PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) has become a major concern among those involved in managing wild and captive cervid populations. CWD is a fatal, highly transmissible spongiform encephalopathy caused by an abnormally folded protein, called a prion. Prions are present in a number of tissues, including feces and urine in CWD infected animals, suggesting multiple modes of transmission, including animal-to-animal, environmental, and by fomite. CWD management is complicated by the lack of practical, non-invasive, live-animal screening tests. Recently, there has been a focus on how the volatile odors of feces and urine can be used to discriminate between infected and noninfected animals in several different species. Such a tool may prove useful in identifying potentially infected live animals, carcasses, urine, feces, and contaminated environments. Toward this goal, dogs were trained to detect and discriminate CWD infected individuals from non-infected deer in a laboratory setting. Dogs were tested with novel panels of fecal samples demonstrating the dogs\' ability to generalize a learned odor profile to novel odor samples based on infection status. Additionally, dogs were transitioned from alerting to fecal samples to an odor profile that consisted of CWD infection status with a different odor background using different sections of gastrointestinal tracts. These results indicated that canine biodetectors can discriminate the specific odors emitted from the feces of non-infected versus CWD infected white-tailed deer as well as generalizing the learned response to other tissues collected from infected individuals. These findings suggest that the health status of wild and farmed cervids can be evaluated non-invasively for CWD infection via monitoring of volatile metabolites thereby providing an effective tool for rapid CWD surveillance.
摘要：
慢性消耗性疾病（CWD）已成为参与管理野生和圈养宫颈种群的人们的主要关注点。CWD是致命的，由异常折叠的蛋白质引起的高度传染性海绵状脑病，叫做朊病毒。朊病毒存在于许多组织中，包括CWD感染动物的粪便和尿液，暗示了多种传播方式，包括动物对动物，环境,和fomite。CWD管理由于缺乏实用性而变得复杂，非侵入性，活体动物筛查试验。最近,人们一直关注如何利用粪便和尿液中的挥发性气味来区分几种不同物种的受感染动物和未受感染动物。这种工具可能有助于识别潜在感染的活体动物，尸体,尿液,粪便,和污染的环境。为了这个目标,在实验室环境中训练狗检测和区分CWD感染者和未感染鹿。用新型粪便样本对狗进行了测试，证明了狗有能力根据感染状态将学习的气味特征概括为新型气味样本。此外,使用胃肠道的不同部分，将狗从警报转换为粪便样本，然后转换为气味特征，该特征包括具有不同气味背景的CWD感染状态。这些结果表明，犬生物检测器可以区分未感染的白尾鹿和CWD感染的白尾鹿的粪便发出的特定气味，并将学习的反应推广到从受感染个体收集的其他组织。这些发现表明，可以通过监测挥发性代谢物对野生和养殖宫颈的健康状况进行非侵入性评估，从而为快速进行CWD监测提供了有效的工具。
