Innate immunity to infectious bronchitis virus infection in chickens

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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.