Abstract
Throughout North America, chronic wasting disease (CWD) has emerged as perhaps the greatest threat to wild cervid populations, including white-tailed deer (WTD; Odocoileus virginianus). White-tailed deer are the most sought-after big game species across North America with populations of various subspecies in nearly all Canadian provinces, the contiguous US, and Mexico. Documented CWD cases have dramatically increased across the WTD range since the mid-1990s, including in Minnesota, US. CWD surveillance in free-ranging WTD and other cervid populations mainly depends upon immunodetection methods such as immunohistochemistry and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) on medial retropharyngeal lymph nodes and obex. More recent technologies centered on prion protein amplification methods of detection have shown promise as more sensitive and rapid CWD diagnostic tools. Here, we used blinded samples to test the efficacy of real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) in comparison to ELISA for screening tissues collected in 2019 from WTD in southeastern Minnesota, where CWD has been routinely detected since 2016. Our results support previous findings that RT-QuIC is a more sensitive tool for CWD detection than current antibody-based methods. Additionally, a CWD testing protocol that includes multiple lymphoid tissues (e.g., medial retropharyngeal lymph node, parotid lymph node, and palatine tonsil) per animal can effectively identify a greater number of CWD detections in a WTD population than a single sample type (e.g., medial retropharyngeal lymph nodes). These results show that the variability of CWD pathogenesis, sampling protocol, and testing platform must be considered for the effective detection and management of CWD throughout North America.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 50-62 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Journal of wildlife diseases |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:the Oxbow Park and Zollman Zoo. This project would not have been possible were it not for the collection of biological samples, and we are grateful to the following persons for their assistance in the field: MNDNR Wildlife staff, Roxanne J. Larsen, Negin Goodarzi, Devender Kumar, Jeremy Schefers, as well as USDA APHIS Wildlife Services staff. Funding for research performed herein was provided by the Minnesota State Legislature through the Minnesota Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station Rapid Agricultural Response Fund, University of Minnesota Office of Vice President for Research, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and start-up funds awarded to P.A.L. through the Minnesota Agricultural, Research, Education, Extension and Technology Transfer (AGREETT) program.
Funding Information:
We thank National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Labs, especially Byron Caughey, An-drew Hughson, and Christina Orru for training and assistance with the implementation of RT-QuIC. Fred Schendel, Tom Douville, and staff of the University of Minnesota Biotechnology Resource Center provided critical support with respect to large-scale production of recombinant proteins. Kathi Wilson of the Colorado State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory kindly provided assistance with ELISA and IHC testing of samples reported herein. We thank the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for secure data storage of computational products stemming from our work. Kristen Davenport helped guide our statistical analysis. Lon Hebl graciously provided access to animals housed at the Oxbow Park and Zollman Zoo. This project would not have been possible were it not for the collection of biological samples, and we are grateful to the following persons for their assistance in the field: MNDNR Wildlife staff, Roxanne J. Larsen, Negin Goodarzi, Devender Kumar, Jeremy Schefers, as well as USDA APHIS Wildlife Services staff. Funding for research performed herein was provided by the Minnesota State Legislature through the Minnesota Legisla-tive-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station Rapid Agricultural Response Fund, University of Minnesota Office of Vice President for Research, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and start-up funds awarded to P.A.L. through the Minnesota Agricultural, Research, Education, Extension and Technology Transfer (AGREETT) program.
Publisher Copyright:
© Wildlife Disease Association 2022.
Keywords
- CWD
- ELISA
- IHC
- RT-QuIC
- diagnostics
- sampling
- testing protocol
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
- Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
