Gas chromatographic detection of in vitro and in vivo activities of certain canine viruses.

The possibility that gas chromatographic techniques might be useful for the rapid detection or differentiation of microorganisms has attracted the attention of a number of investigators. In some instances, distinctive chromatographic patterns have been observed for each bacterium examined in studies of excreted substances which either are volatile or can be made volatile [1-3]. Distinctive chromatographic signatures have been observed also when certain cell constituents were examined directly [4, 5] or following pyrolysis [6, 7]. Recently we have reported that a gas chromatograph equipped with an electron capture detector (ECD) is extremely sensitive to certain typical microbial products [8], and the instrumentation, therefore, could be useful for detecting the presence of very low numbers of freeliving bacteria in culture media [9]. Because of the marked response of the ECD to certain metabolites produced by bacteria cultured in vitro, it was considered possible that the detector might be used also for the detection of metabolites elaborated by virus-infected cells during the course of infection in tissue culture or in the living host animal. Preliminary studies of infectious canine hepatitis (ICH) virus and equine infectious anemia virus indicated that gas chromatographic techniques indeed could be applied for the detection of these viral infections by examination of the sera of animals at various stages of illness [10,