Modern methods of foot-and-mouth disease diagnosis (review)

development, improvement and application of modern methods for the diagnosis of FMD (PCR, ELISA). Results of research and discussion. Generally, a suspected case of FMD can be identified based on observations of clinical signs. However, diagnoses based on clinical symptoms are highly unreliable, because several other diseases share similar symptoms as FMD, which include swine vesicular disease (SVD), vesicular stomatitis and vesicular exanthema. Swine are vulnerable to vesicular stomatitis, SVD, and FMD, whereas cattle are vulnerable to vesicular stomatitis and FMD, all of which could not be distinguished based on clinical symptoms. Conventional techniques such as complement fixation test (CFT), virus isolation test, virus neutralization test (VNT), and ELISA are routinely used to detect FMDV in clinical samples. Advancement in molecular techniques accelerates rapid and accurate diagnoses of FMDV through detection of the viral RNA. In this article, the most recent advancements in reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and RT-loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP)-based methods are thoroughly reviewed. Lastly, the roles of lateral flow immunochromatographic (LFI) test strips in FMDV diagnosis are also discussed. Conclusions and prospects for further research. Various diagnostic methods ranging from conventional such as virus isolation and competitive- and blocking-antigen ELISA to molecular-based methods such as RT-PCR and RT-LAMP have been developed over the years. Although ELISA-based methods have good diagnostic sensitivity and specificity, molecular detection methods have the advantage of higher analytical sensitivity for the detection of minimal viral RNA.