ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6740-3312
Current Organisation
Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut / Bundesforschungsinstitut für Tiergesundheit
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Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 25-05-2022
DOI: 10.3390/MICROORGANISMS10061095
Abstract: Since the identification of Hendra virus (HeV) infections in horses in Australia in 1994, more than 80 outbreaks in horses have been reported, and four out of seven spillover infections in humans had a fatal outcome. With the availability of a subunit vaccine based on the HeV-Glycoprotein (HeV-G), there is a need to serologically Differentiate the Infected from the Vaccinated Animals (DIVA). We developed an indirect ELISA using HeV-G expressed in Leishmania tarentolae and HeV-Nucleoprotein (HeV-N) expressed in recombinant baculovirus-infected insect cells as antigens. During evaluation, we tested panels of sera from naïve, vaccinated and infected horses that either originated from a Hendra-virus free region, or had been pre-tested in validated diagnostic tests. Our data confirm the reliability of this approach, as HeV-N-specific antibodies were only detected in sera from infected horses, while HeV-G-specific antibodies were detected in infected and vaccinated horses with a high level of specificity and sensitivity. Given the excellent correlation of data obtained for German and Australian HeV-negative horses, we assume that this test can be applied for the testing of horse serum s les from a variety of geographical regions.
Publisher: Hindawi Limited
Date: 19-01-2019
DOI: 10.1111/TBED.13105
Publisher: Hindawi Limited
Date: 21-09-2020
DOI: 10.1111/TBED.13822
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Date: 2015
DOI: 10.1071/AN14137
Abstract: Conventional shearing of sheep is labour-intensive, expensive and presents significant occupational health and safety risks. The only alternative at present is based on injection of epidermal growth factor, which severs the fibre at the follicle level. This technology cannot be used in pregnant animals and requires application of a net to retain the severed fleece. An alternative is to create a weakened zone within the wool staple, which would be sufficiently strong to retain the fleece on the sheep while a protective covering regrows, but sufficiently weak as to allow painless and automated removal of the fleece. We demonstrate that this approach is possible using mixtures of amino acids lacking lysine and methionine. Initially we demonstrate the relationships between staple strength, a subjective ‘harvestability’ score and a subjective ‘pain’ score, using fleeces from animals treated with varying levels of cortisol to create a wide range of strengths of wool attachment. We assigned a score to the ease with which we could manually break the staples, and also to the animal’s response to breaking the staples still attached to the skin. The relationships between these variables indicated that a staple was considered harvestable and could be removed with minimal skin flinch response at a staple strength of ~10–13 N/kTex. Staples within this range were then produced by intravenous infusion of mixtures of amino acids lacking in lysine and methionine for a 5-day period. The weak point was uniformly created across the entire fleece and when a prototype roller-pin device was applied to the weakened wool, it uniformly broke the fleece of the three sheep tested. The mode of action of the amino acid treatment on wool growth was studied. There was no effect of unbalanced amino acids on the rate of follicle bulb cell ision, the number of active wool follicles, or the length of the keratinisation zone in the wool follicle. Fibre diameter was reduced by ~4 microns by treatment, and intrinsic fibre strength (strength relative to cross-sectional area of the wool fibres), was reduced by ~50%. Results of these trials are encouraging but further work is required to develop a practical, on-farm method of altering systemic amino acid supply and to design an automated, high-throughput system of severing the weakened wool.
Location: Germany
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Sandra Diederich.