**2. The disease**

An "infection of birds caused by Avian paramyxovirus 1 (APMV 1) with an ICPI value more than 0.7, possessing three arginine (R) or lysine (K) residues between

position 113 and 116 of the F gene, and possessing phenylalanine (F) at position 117" is what the Office Internationale des Epizooties (OIE) defines as ND. The OIE has reclassified the illness, which was formerly included as a list A infection and is now one of the notifiable avian diseases. There have also been reports of significant productivity and financial losses due to the sickness. The production and economic losses caused by ND were shown to be more significant and severe than its economic effects. The economic effects of ND on commercial poultry trade were found to more important and severe [1].

## **3. Historical perspectives**

Between 1926 and 1930, reports of ND in hens were made in several nations, including Indonesia [2], Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England [3] and Ranikhet Village, Chennai, India [4, 5]. ND has been reported in many countries, including the USA [6], Australia [7, 8], Malaysia [9], South Africa, and Mozambique [10]. The sudden emergence of ND in a virulent form during the beginning of twentieth century was attributed to number of reasons, which include a sudden change in host population, role of feral birds acting as natural reservoir, shift of virus from enzootic form to epizootic form or to the result of a major mutation at the genome level [1, 11]. These views were reinforced by the emergence of ND as panzootic and report of ND in caged birds and feral birds [12–15].

### **4. Impacts**

Two hundred and forty one species of birds, or 27 of the 50 orders of that class, have been recorded to have ND, which predominantly affects chickens. House crows, pigeons, ducks and geese, emus, water fowl. Due to their apparent disease resistance, village chickens have been reported to be affected by the virus just as severely as commercial poultry.

### **5. Control**

According to reports, NDV still poses a concern and continues to produce serious outbreaks even if control measures like good management practices and biosecurity standards are available at the farm level [8]. As a result, routine vaccination is the major goal of control measures. However, it has been noted that vaccination is not straightforward because it only prevents clinical sickness and mortality and does not stop virus multiplication, which makes the virulent become endemic [1].

Vaccination against ND in chickens has been reported to be carried out with live naturally occurring and artificially attenuated non pathogenic forms of the agent, inactivated viruses or their immunogenic determinants, subunit vaccines, live genetically modified vaccines, DNA vaccines, marker vaccines and edible vaccines. However, most of the currently available vaccines were not found to be able to provide desirable immunity even after using multiple doses [1], which has been justified by regular outbreaks of ND in vaccinated flocks.

*Expression of Certain Cytokine Genes in Avian Cells Infected with Newcastle Disease Virus DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106921*

While inactivated vaccines give primed birds a sustained high tire immune response, live vaccines were reported to stimulate the production of both humoral and cellular immune responses in addition to mucosal immune responses. Paranteral vaccination with inactivated virus often elicits serum neutralizing antibodies, and no local immune response, in contrast to attenuated NDV when used as live vaccines, which have been shown to have the ability to revert to virulent strains with transfer from bird to bird.

### **6. The virus**

#### **6.1 Classification**

The International Committee on Taxonomy of viruses (ICTV) has been classified NDV under the order *Mononegavirales*, family *Paramyxoviridae*, subfamily *paramyxovirinae*, and genus *Avulavirus.* The genus *Avalavirus* as on date has reported to have only one species, namely the *Avian Paramyxovirus* (APMV) that comprises of nine serotypes—APMV 1 to 9. Of the nine serotypes, APMV-1 has been identified to be responsible for clinical ND.

#### **6.2 Morphology**

The nucleocapsid of the NDV virus is reported to measure 1000 nm in length, 17– 18 nm in width, and an envelope covered in spike glycoproteins measuring 8–12 nm in diameter. The NDV virus particles are described as being pleomorphic and varying in size from 150 to 400 nm. According to the "rule of six theory", which is unique to members of the family Paramyxoviridae, the genome was also found to be typical of Baltimore group v, single strand of negative sense RNA with a molecular weight of 5.2–5.7 106 Da and 15,186 nucleotides. Six significant proteins have also been identified to be encoded by the genomic RNA, especially the haemagglutinin neuraminidase protein (HN), phosphoprotein (P), matrix protein (M), F, and big protein (L). According to reports, Mrna editing at the P gene led to the formation of the two additional proteins, V and W.

#### **6.3 Methodology**

#### *6.3.1 Sample preparation*

#### *6.3.1.1 Procedure*

The experiment was conducted with infected (treatment) and mock infected (control).


the treatment and control groups were infected with the seventh passaged NDV (D58) virus and MEM, respectively.

