Current research projects

• NADIR The Network of Animal Disease Infectiology research facilities
  National research platform for zoonoses
• Rodent-borne infectious diseases with zooonotic potential (e.g. Hanta)
• Prevalence, diagnostics and virulence factors for emerging diseases (Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever)
• West Nile-Virus: Studies on the antibody and virus prevalence in Germany and on general factors which modulate the transmission efficiency between humans and birds
• Threat of a deliberate contamination of food with viruses that are pathogenic to human (hantavirus and hepatitis E virus)
• Enzymatic rendering for prion-free animal products.
• Propagation and titration of the scrapie agent from mice and hamsters for the prozess validation of the isolation and purification steps from therapeutic proteins from human plasma
• The effect of leucodepletion on transmission of BSE by transfusion of sheep blood components
• GoatBSE: Improvement of goat TSE discriminative diagnosis and susceptibility based assessment of BSE infectivity in goat milk and meat.
• Detecting bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) infectivity in blood of clinical and preclinical cattle experimentally infected with different BSE strains by blood transfusion to recipient bovines
• Network of Excellence(NoE) NEUROPRION: Prevention, control and management of prion diseases
• Transmission of unclassified scrapie survey samples to conventional and transgenic mice
• Analysis of the distribution and infectivity of two recently discovered atypical High-type (H-type) and Low-type (L-type) strains of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) agent in cattle tissues for human consumption.
• Management of a specified pathogen free small animal husbandry/ generation of transgenic mouse models
• Support of animal facilities