The primer pair 261F/R designed from MBV genomic sequence yields a 261 bp fragment by agarose gel electrophoresis as observed in Fig. 1. This 261 bp PCR product was obtained from 10
isolates of MBV positive samples that were previously confirmed by histology as being infected with MBV. These samples represent isolates from 4 geographic locations including Hawaii, Thailand, Taiwan,and Malaysia collected from 1991 to 2004.The amplified PCR products were sequenced and compared to the MBV genomic sequence from which the primers were designed. The sequence of the 261 bp amplicon was submitted to GenBank under accession number (AY819785). As expected,the 261 bp amplicon showed exact homology with the original MBV sequence. This indicates that the PCR reaction specifically amplified a fragment of the MBV genome.