The First Demonstration of Pigeon Circovirus Infection in the Czech Republic Based on Histological Testing and Nested PCR

Abstract

The aim of the study was to demonstrate presence of pigeon circovirus in the Czech Republic. Squabs suspected of being infected with pigeon circovirus were selected based on clinical and pathological testing. To reach the diagnosis, a method of proving the pigeon circovirus DNA based on nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was developed. The specificity of the PCR reaction was verified using PCR product sequencing. A sequence of PCR products was compared against pigeon circovirus sequences published so far. The comparison has confirmed the highest relation between the isolate South Moravian 1 detected by us and the North-Irish isolate 7050. The trial has thus brought an ultimate proof of the presence of pigeon circovirus in the Czech Republic. The nested PCR method for proving pigeon circovirus was developed and a new isolate of the virus was detected.

A disease complex associated with pigeon circovirus infection, young pigeon disease syndrome

“…This study and previous studies indicate that the prevalence of PiCV infection is generally high in Germany. Comparable prevalences have been reported in the Czech Republic, Belgium and Northern Ireland (Todd et al ., 2002;Taras et al ., 2003).…”

“…An alignment of published partial hexon sequences of all 12 FAdV reference strains (Meulemans et al ., 2001(Meulemans et al ., , 2004) was used to design primers binding to a conserved part of the pedestal region of the hexon gene that would amplify a PCR product of 181 bp. PiCVspecific primers were designed using a strategy described recently (Raue et al ., 2004) based on published PiCV sequence data (Mankartz et al ., 2000;Todd et al ., 2001;Taras et al ., 2003), and amplified a 206 bp region of the C1 gene, encoding the capsid protein. A PCR amplifying part of the cytochrome B gene was used as a control to detect the presence of inhibitors (Hattermann et al ., 2002).…”

The epidemiology, molecular characterization and clinical pathology of circovirus infections in pigeons – current knowledge

“…The progress in molecular biology techniques facilitated rapid and accurate detection of infectious diseases. As a result, cases of PiCV infections in pigeons were subsequently reported in various countries and regions, including Northern Ireland (Smyth & Caroll 1995;Todd et al 2001), Germany (Mankertz et al 2000;Raue et al 2005), Italy (Coletti et al 2000;Franciosini et al 2005), France (Abadie et al 2001), Czech Republic (Taras et al 2003), Belgium (Duchatel et al 2005, Poland (Wieliczko et al 2005;Stenzel et al 2012Stenzel et al , 2014a, Slovenia (Krapez et al 2012), Hungary (Cs agola et al 2012), United Arab Emirates (Ledwo n et al 2011), Iran (Mahzounieh et al 2014, Taiwan (Liao et al 2015), China (Zhang et al 2011;Phan et al 2013;Zhang et al 2015a), Japan (Yamamoto et al 2015) and the USA (Roy et al 2003) (Figure 1). In most reports, the virus was detected in the pigeon species of Columba livia domestica, but in several cases, PiCV genetic material was also detected in Senegal doves (Streptopelia senegalensis) and collared doves (Streptopelia decaocto) (Kub ı cek & Taras 2005;Todd et al 2008).…”

Incidence of Pigeon Circovirus in Eurasian Collared-Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) Detected by Nested PCR

“…The second PCR used the primers Circo2Sn66 5'-GGGTCTGGTTGGGGTTGCAGG-3' and 5'-CTTCCGCCTACGTCGCAAGGAC -3'described above. (Taras et al 2003).…”

“…Presence of PiCV infection may be assumed already on the basis of anamnesis, clinical development in the flock, and evidence of specific intracytoplasmic botryoid inclusions in lymphoid tissue. The ultimate proofs include direct detection of PiCV by electron microscopy (Woods et al 1993), by in situ hybridization , and recently most often by PCR 2002) or nested PCR Taras et al 2003).…”