[The detection of viruses in food of animal origin using the polymerase chain reaction--a review].

Conventional methods for the detection of viruses in food are very time consuming and usually not sensitive enough to detect very low amounts of virus. Modern methods, like nucleic acid hybridization and polymerase chain reaction (PCR), may accelerate the diagnostic procedure considerably. The PCR allows the amplification of a specific DNA-segment by the factor 10(6) or more within a few hours and has already been described for the detection of various food-borne viruses. We summarize the use of PCR in the diagnosis of viral food contaminations and also include some results of our work with the detection of pseudorabies virus (PRV) in artificially contaminated sausages. We found that PCR is in some respect advantageous to the classical tissue culture isolation. The detection level of the PCR in samples of different pH values was compared to virus isolation in tissue culture, and it could be shown that the PCR was less affected by extreme pH values than tissue culture.