Detection of infectious bursal disease virus by reverse transcription/polymerase chain reaction in chicken

Sensitive and specific molecular methods have been used to diagnose and characterise infectious, bursal disease (IBD) infection in chicken in recent years (Lee et al., 1992; Wu et al., 1992; Stram et al. 1994). A reverse transcriptase/polymerase chain reaction (RT/PCR) to amplify the viral genome has been used successfully to amplify the IBDVirus VP2 gene region with oligonucleotide primers selected from the highly conserved region (Jackwood and Jackwood, 1994; Jackwood and Jackwood, 1997; Jackwood and Nielsen, 1997; Cao et al., 1998). The aim of this study was to detect lBDVirus in bursal samples collected from chicken flocks showing clinical symptoms of IBD in Elazig region by a RT/PCR using specific primers to the VP2 gene.