Request for assistance, June 2024
Sydney University
Project: Identify Gene resulting in susceptibility to FIP
(Feline Infectious Peritonitis)

RESEARCHERS

Professor Jacqui Norris has been involved in the diagnostic of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) side for 24 years. Dr Sally Coggins and Dr Richard Malik have focused on treating FIP for the past 4-5 years. Sally has just finished her PhD and hopefully will soon be a Postdoctoral researcher.

BACKGROUND

Professor Niels Pedersen and colleagues showed some time ago that the heritability to SUSCEPTIBILITY to get FIP is about 50%. This means that if you exert selection pressure by looking for sires and queens that produce FIP kittens and desexing them, you will decrease the prevalence of the disease.

Now that we have cured most cats with FIP, we advise people not to breed from cats that survived FIP.

PROJECT

We hope to find more specific gene targets that will allow us to tell, through DNA testing using PCR, if a given cat is at risk of producing affected kittens.

We are especially interested in hearing about scenarios where two or more individuals in a litter develop FIP. We then want to do whole genome sequencing on the DNA of the FIP-affected cats, normal littermates, and ideally, both queen and stud.  If we can do this half a dozen times, we should be in a good position to find some genes involved in susceptibility to FIP.

While it is EASY to get DNA from a 3ml blood sample (collected in an EDTA tube) from a kitten with FIP – it’s much harder to get a set of samples from the affected kitten, plus any other affected kitten, other non-affected kittens, plus mum and dad but that’s what we want to do.

CONTACT

If you can help with suitable kittens and cats – FABULOUS.

Please contact Dr Richard Malik: richard.malik@sydney.edu.au

The original source document for this announcement was kindly provided by the ACF Judges Guild and can be viewed here