Studies leading to sustainable strategies for the control of Marek's disease: is vaccination responsible for virulence evolution in Marek's disease?

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The objectives of this project are to provide the experimental data necessary to understand (i) the evolutionary pressures which made Marek's disease virus more virulent over the second half of last century, and particularly to test whether vaccination drove this evolution, (ii) to predict future evolutionary directions for a variety of MDV control measures (risk assessment), and (iii) to identify the key biological features of the MDV-chicken interaction which have resulted in virulence evolution to determine whether any other diseases might also increase in virulence in response to vaccination or other control measures.

unavailable