Prospects for rapid diagnosis of foot-and-mouth disease in the field using reverse transcriptase-pcr

RAPID and accurate diagnosis is necessary for the effective control of foot-and-mouth disease ( fmd ). The rna template was amplified using a single thermocycling programme consisting of a rt step (60°C for 600 seconds) followed by 50 cycles of pcr amplification (95°C for 20 seconds and 60°C for 30 seconds). rt-pcr products of the expected size (97 base pairs) could be visualised in a 2 per cent agarose gel (data not shown) indicating that the correct region of the fmdv genome had been successfully amplified.