Innate immunity to infectious bronchitis virus infection in chickens

传染性支气管炎（IB）是一种高度传染性的病毒感染，它影响着包括北美在内的全球鸡业，增加了生产成本。乙型肝炎控制在很大程度上依赖于含有实验室减毒弱病毒的疫苗。由于两个主要原因，在接种疫苗的鸡中会出现乙型肝炎的暴发。首先，弱毒疫苗病毒通过禽群获得致病能力。第二，野IB病毒在疫苗接种压力下发生突变，导致严重疾病。因此，建立更可持续的控制措施是当务之急。一种可能的方法是使用免疫兴奋剂和灭活的IB病毒，而不是由弱病毒制成的疫苗，以诱导对暴露的IB病毒的持久抵抗力。为了建立这种控制手段，我们将在鸡身上建立实验性IB病毒感染模型，研究呼吸道黏膜抵抗的自然机制。然后，我们将确定自然抗性的介质，并使用合适的合成或天然免疫刺激剂来增加共同施用灭活病毒的有效性。所提出的研究将导致开发新的和可持续的方法来控制鸡的IB。

Infectious bronchitis (IB) is a highly contagious viral infection, which impact the chicken operations across the globe including North America, increasing the cost of production. IB control heavily depends on vaccines containing laboratory attenuated weak viruses. For two major reasons, outbreaks of IB arise in vaccinated chickens. Firstly, weakened vaccine virus gains the ability to cause disease by going through the flock. Secondly, mutation of the field IB virus against the pressure imposed by vaccination lead to severe disease. Therefore, it is imperative to establish more sustainable control measures against IB in chickens. One of the potential ways is the use of immune stimulants along with inactivated IB virus, instead of vaccines made of weak viruses, to induce long lasting resistance against exposed IB virus. In order to establish this mean of control, we will establish an experimental IB virus infection model in chickens to study the natural mechanisms of resistance in the respiratory mucosa. Then we will identify mediators of natural resistance and use suitable synthetic or natural immune stimulant to increase the effectiveness of co-administered inactivated viruses. The proposed studies will lead to development of novel and sustainable ways of controlling IB in chickens.