AASV Foundation Funded Research: Final Report Available

March 31, 2021 — 

Dr. Fabio Vannucci and co-investigators at the University of Minnesota were awarded $19,700 from the AASV Foundation to fund the project, "Development of a diagnostic platform for in situ detection and subtyping of PRRSV within histological lesions," in 2019. The project is complete and the final report is available.

The goals of the project were to develop and validate a novel RNA-in situ hybridization (RNA-ISH) for detection and genotyping PRRSV strains in lung lesions, to evaluate the analytical performance and agreement between PRRSV ORF5 sequences detected by RNA-ISH in lung lesions and by classical sequencing obtained from tissue homogenate, and to differentiate wild-type PRRSV from vaccine strain in lung tissues of animals naturally infected during outbreak scenarios.

This research is expected to benefit the industry by offering a rapid diagnostic tool to genetically characterize PRRSV strains in association with histopathological lesions. This platform will help to better define introduction of a new PRRSv by specifically detecting RNA sequences present within the lesions. This approach will also assess whether the sequencing method currently used is detecting the PRRSv strain that is actually in the lesions, and consequently causing the clinical disease.

Read the final report: Development of a diagnostic platform for in situ detection and subtyping of PRRSV within histological lesions.