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，影响包括北美在内的全球养鸡业，增加了生产成本。传染性支气管炎的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，在接种疫苗的鸡中出现了IB暴发。首先，弱化的疫苗病毒通过穿过群体获得致病能力。其次，在疫苗接种施加的压力下，野生型IB病毒的突变会导致严重的疾病。因此，建立更可持续的鸡传染性支气管炎控制措施势在必行。其中一个潜在的方法是使用免疫兴奋剂和灭活的IB病毒，而不是用弱病毒制成的疫苗来诱导对暴露的IB病毒的持久抵抗力。为了建立这种控制手段，我们将建立一种实验性的鸡传染性支气管炎病毒感染模型，以研究呼吸道粘膜的自然耐药机制。然后，我们将确定天然抵抗力的介体，并使用适当的合成或天然免疫刺激剂来提高联合注射灭活病毒的有效性。建议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.