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Listen to this siteWednesday 17 September 2008
Study Duration : January 2007 to March 2012
Little is known about atypical scrapie, a newly recognised prion disease in sheep. This research project aims to provide data on the infectivity of atypical scrapie following oral dosing and will inform part of the risk assessment of what, if any, human risk there might be from atypical scrapie.
Brain material from one atypical ARR/ARR case and one atypical AHQ/AHQ scrapie case will be used to orally dose six ARR/ARR (genotype most resistant to scrapie) sheep. All dosing will occur within the first 14 days of life. Of the 12 dosed animals, six animals (three of each genotype) will be killed at the cut-off age for current Specified risk material (SRM) regulations (12 months), and the remaining 6 animals will be kept alive for a further 12 months. A full range of neural, visceral and lymphoid tissues will be collected and a proportion (initially) tested by Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assays (ELISA) and Immunohistochemistry. A range of tissues will be harvested for bioassay in a transgenic mouse model as these can be considered more sensitive than biochemical testing.
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