Journal article
Development of a quantitative PCR (qPCR) for Giardia and analysis of the prevalence, cyst shedding and genotypes of Giardia present in sheep across four states in Australia
R Yang, C Jacobson, G Gardner, I Carmichael, AJD Campbell, U Ryan
Experimental Parasitology | Published : 2014
Abstract
A novel quantitative PCR (qPCR) for Giardia at the glutamate dehydrogenase (gdh) locus was developed and validated. The qPCR was used to screen a total of 3412 lamb faecal samples collected from approximately 1189 lambs at three sampling periods (weaning, post-weaning and pre-slaughter) from eight farms across South Australia (SA), New South Wales (NSW), Victoria (Vic) and Western Australia (WA). The overall prevalence was 20.2% (95% CI 18.9-21.6) and of the 690 positives, 473 were successfully typed. In general, the prevalence of Giardia varied widely across the different farms with the highest prevalence in one WA farm (42.1%) at pre-slaughter sampling and the lowest prevalence in one Vict..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This study was funded by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), Australian Wool Innovation Limited (AWI) and the Australian Government. We thank the participating farmers for their support and providing access to sheep for sample collection. We thank Justin Hoad for providing faecal samples from NSW. Samples from the WA farms were collected and DNA extracted by Joshua Sweeny. Thanks also go to Josephine Ng-Hublin for DNA extraction of faecal samples collected from the eastern states.