INTRODUCTION

The Dumont d'Urville International Mobility Fund has, for the last two years, supported joint New Zealand/French work on the ostreid herpes virus-1 (OsHV-1).

Details of the projected work are provided in Webb (2011). Full citations to this and any subsequent works mentioned here in the text [see full report] are cited in the current report under Section 5 Publication Intentions.

The project focused on the development of assays and the detection and characterisation of the ostreid herpes virus–1. End-point PCR and QPCR methods have been developed and employed to detect OsHV-1 infections in fresh and paraffin-embedded archival histology specimens of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas and other bivalve species. The specimens were from French mortality events with known involvement of OsHV-1 and oysters sampled from mortality events in New Zealand to which no cause has yet been ascribed.