ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Veterinary and Zoonotic Infection
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2025.1630865
This article is part of the Research TopicEmerging and re-emerging animal viruses: Advances in diagnosis, pathogenesis and control strategiesView all 5 articles
Safe and efficient transportation of clinical samples for molecular detection of African swine fever virus
Provisionally accepted
- 1Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Winnipeg, Canada
- 2National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Winnipeg, Canada
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
African swine fever (ASF) continues to devastate swine populations across the globe. The causative agent, ASF virus (ASFV), is very stable and can remain infectious over long periods of time especially in contaminated blood and tissue samples. Therefore, the transport of clinical samples from the field to diagnostic laboratories requires special precautions to reduce the risk of spreading the disease. Inactivation of ASFV in the clinical samples prior to transporting to the lab eliminates the risk and the requirement of higher biosafety facilities to perform ASF diagnostics. This study evaluated the use of a commercial molecular transport medium (MTM) to inactivate ASFV and stabilize the viral DNA in cell culture and clinical samples collected from pigs inoculated with different ASFV strains. In all the sample types tested, complete inactivation of ASFV was observed, without affecting the subsequent detection of ASFV genomic material by real-time polymerase chain reaction (real time PCR). The MTM preserved the stability of ASFV genomic material eliminating the need to refrigerate the oral fluid samples. The data shows that the MTM can be used reliably to ensure safety and stability of routine clinical samples such as whole blood, spleen swabs and alternative sample types such as oral fluid, allowing expansion and streamlining ASF molecular diagnostics.
Keywords: African Swine Fever, ASFV, Inactivation, MTM, transport, Samples, Oral fluid
Received: 29 May 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rempel, Onyilagha, Goonewardene and Ambagala. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aruna Ambagala, National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease, Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Winnipeg, Canada
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.