Viruses and Viral Diagnostics

Wild rodents carry viruses, but during the last 60 years the specific pathogen free technology has been applied to make laboratory rodents virus free, because they may interfere with research projects or cause zoonoses. Laboratory rodent colonies are, therefore, currently screened for virus infections, which can be done by serology or polymerase chain reaction (PCR). For more detailed characterization of the virome, i.e. all the viruses carried by an animal host, cultivation and sequencing can be applied, which also shows that commercial colonies in spite of the specific pathogen free technology, are not free of all viruses. Recently it has also been argued that the lack of viruses in laboratory rodents make these less translational to humans.