Ahmet Kursat Azkur

Kirikkale University · Department of Virology

Bovine rotavirus (BRV) which is the leading viral agent of neonatal calf diarrhea. In recent years, the use of shotgun metagenomics has emerged as a powerful tool for the detection and characterization of viruses. In the present study, BRV was isolated on MA-104 cells from feces of a neonatal calf with diarrhea and shotgun metagenomics was performe...

The current monkeypox disease (MPX) outbreak constitutes a new threat and challenge for our society. With more than 55,000 confirmed cases in 103 countries, World Health Organization declared the ongoing MPX outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on July 23, 2022. The current MPX outbreak is the largest, most widespread...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is still a significant health problem in human. HBV severity or sensitivity of patients may be based on the individual genetic factors significantly. The aim of this study is to investigate the association of CCR5 (CCR5Δ32), TLR3 (rs5743313) functional gene polymorphisms, IFN‐ɣ level in HBV infection, which are thought to pl...

There has been an important change in the clinical characteristics and immune profile of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients during the pandemic thanks to the extensive vaccination programs. Here, we highlight recent studies on COVID-19, from the clinical and immunological characteristics to the protective and risk factors for severity and...

Poxviruses are among the most important diseases for humanity. An important triumph was achieved with the eradication of smallpox defined by the World Health Organization in 1979. There are many viruses in the poxvirus family that are pathogenic for both humans and other creatures. Some of these disease agents contain zoonotic potential. The family...

There has been an important change in the clinical characteristics and immune profile of COVID-19 patients during the pandemic thanks to the extensive vaccination programs. Here, we highlight recent studies on COVID-19, from the clinical and immunological characteristics to the protective and risk factors for severity and mortality of COVID-19. The...

Şiddetli akut solunum sendromu koronavirüs 2’nin (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; SARS-CoV-2) neden olduğu koronavirüs hastalığı (coronavirus disease-19; COVID-19), insanlarda şiddetli klinik bulgulara ve ölümlere yol açmış, ülkelerin sağlık sistemlerini etkilemiş ve tüm dünyada beklenmedik pek çok sorunlara neden olmuştur. Henüz t...

A potential immunological silver bullet for COVID-19: the trivalent chimpanzee adenoviral serotype-68 vector (Tri:ChAd)

Özet Sığır koronavirüs (BCoV) ve sığır rotavirüs (BRV) enfeksiyonları, sığır yetiştiriciliğindeki önemli sorunlardan biri olan neonatal buzağı ishallerinin en sık rastlanan viral etkenleri arasında yer almaktadır. Bu çalışmada, Kırıkkale ve çevre illerindeki neonatal ishalli 110 buzağıda BCoV ve BRV etkenleri RT-PCR ile araştırıldı ve pozitif BRV ö...

Since the first reports of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, there have been 198 million confirmed cases worldwide as of August 2021. The scientific community has joined efforts to gain knowledge of the newly emerged virus named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), the immunopathological...

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), has caused an unprecedented global social and economic impact, and high numbers of deaths. Many risk factors have been identified in the progression of COVID‐19 into a severe and critical stage, including old age, male ge...

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019(COVID‐19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), has caused an unprecedented global social and economic impact, and high numbers of deaths. Many risk factors have been identified in the progression of COVID‐19 into a severe and critical stage, including old age, male gen...

Schmallenberg virus (SBV) infection, discovered in 2011, was reported in Europe including Turkey, Africa and recently in some Asian countries. Commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits were widely used by researchers in many epidemiological studies and SBV diagnosis. The aim of this study was to optimise indirect in-house ELISA that...

Schmallenberg virus (SBV), discovered in Germany in 2011, causes congenital malformations in ruminants. Reverse-transcription real-time PCR (RT-rtPCR) assays based on various segments of SBV have been developed for molecular detection. We developed alternative RT-rtPCR assays for SBV detection to avoid earlier reported mutations and hypervariable r...

In December 2019, China reported the first cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19). This disease, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome‐related coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), has developed into a pandemic. To date it has resulted in ~6.5 million confirmed cases and caused almost 400,000 related deaths worldwide. Unequivocally, the C...

In December 2019, China reported the first cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This disease, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has developed into a pandemic. To date it has resulted in~5.6 million confirmed cases and caused 353,334 related deaths worldwide. Unequivocally, the COVID-19...

As a zoonotic disease that has already spread globally to several million human beings and possibly to domestic and wild animals, eradication of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) appears practically impossible. There is a pressing need to improve our understanding of the immunology of this disease to contain the pandemic by developing vaccines an...

Schmallenberg virus (SBV), a neurotropic member of the genus Orthobunyavirus, infects ruminants and causes neurological lesions and fetal malformations including cerebellar hypoplasia, hydranencephaly, and porencephaly. The aim of this study is to establish intracerebral (i.c.) infection of SBV in newborn BALB/c mice and to investigate some of the...

Schmallenberg virus (SBV), discovered in 2011 in Germany, is associated with clinical manifestations of fever, diarrhea, reduced milk yield, abortions and congenital malformations in ruminants. Despite many studies performed for SBV, there is no detailed research on in vitro apoptotic effect of SBV. This study is aimed to determine apoptosis pathwa...

Toxoplasma (T.) gondii is an obligatory intracellular apicomplexan parasite. The donkey is one of the intermediate hosts of T. gondii. There are almost no data about T. gondii infection in donkeys, apart from a few seroprevalence reports. The aim of the study was to detect the formation of extracellular traps by donkey polymorphonuclear neutrophils...

Relatively high prevalence and mortality rates of bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) have been reported in recent epidemics in some countries, including Turkey, when compared with previous outbreaks. A limited number of complete genome sequences of BEF virus (BEFV) are available in the GenBank Database. In this study, the complete genome of highly pathog...

Background/aim: The chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a mosquito-borne disease and has recently been causing explosive outbreaks. The CHIKV has spread throughout all continents. Although the first chikungunya case imported from India to Turkey was reported in 2012, there is no detailed epidemiologic study in Turkey yet. The aim of this study was to inve...

Regional cases of bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) were documented previously in Turkey. Previous cases were confirmed in SouthEast Turkey with low cow mortality. Recent BEF-suspected outbreaks with high mortality were documented in many regions of Turkey in 2012. The aim of study was the epidemiological examination of the outbreak and molecular charac...

The main aim of this study was to compare extracellular traps (NETs) formation by polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMNs) of cattle and sheep when exposed to T. gondii tachyzoites in vitro. The effects of parasite concentrations and different incubation periods on NETs development in cattle and sheep PMNs were studied. The effect of NET structures on...

A virus, which effects ruminants, was firstly described in 2011 in Europe. There are limited information about this virus called Schmallenberg in Turkey. The aim of the present study was to determine the seroprevalance of Schmallenberg virus (SBV), which may cause major economic losses to sheep, and the association between seroprevalance and some g...

There have been extensive developments on cellular and molecular mechanisms of immune regulation in allergy, asthma, autoimmune diseases, tumor development, organ transplantation, and chronic infections during the last few years. Better understanding the functions, reciprocal regulation, and counterbalance of subsets of immune and inflammatory cell...

Abortion, neonatal deaths, and infertility cause important production losses in the livestock industry. Many viral infections are responsible for changes in hematological values of animals. This study aimed to find whether there is any difference in blood parameters of cattle that are naturally infected with BVDV, BHV-1, and BHV-4 and Brucella-sero...

Schmallenberg virus (SBV) infection emerged in European domestic and wild ruminants in 2011. There is very limited information about the characterization of SBV isolates and the epidemiology of its infections in the rest of world, except for in European countries. We investigated the circulation of SBV in cattle herds in Central Anatolia, Turkey, i...

The aim of the study was to determine the epidemiological data of bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), bovine herpesvirus-1 (BHV-1), bovine herpesvirus-4 (BHV-4), bovine herpesvirus-5 (BHV-5) and Brucella-associated cattle that were previously reported to have abortion and infertility problems in Ankara, Corum, Kirikkale and Yozgat provinces, Turkey...

Allergen-specific immunotherapy (SIT) is the only available curative treatment of allergic diseases. Recent evidence provided a plausible explanation to its multiple mechanisms inducing both rapid desensitization and long-term allergen-specific immune tolerance, and suppression of allergic inflammation in the affected tissues. During SIT, periphera...

##Assembly-Data-START## Sequencing Technology :: Sanger dideoxy sequencing ##Assembly-Data-END##

Regional cases of bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) were documented previously in Turkey. Previous cases were confirmed in South-East Turkey with low cow mortality. Recent BEF-suspected outbreaks with high mortality were documented in many regions of Turkey in 2012. The aim of study was the epidemiological examination of the outbreak and molecular chara...

This, partly retrospective study, was designed to determine the seroprevalence of Schmallenberg virus (SBV), a new Orthobunyavirus first reported in Germany in late 2011, in domestic ruminants from the Middle Black Sea, West, and Southeast regions of Turkey. An indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to screen serum samples collected fr...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether hantaviruses, cowpox viruses, or Leptospira infections were prevalent in Microtus hartingi trapped in Kirsehir Province, located in Central Anatolia, Turkey. Leptospira spp. was detected in 20 of the 43 (46.5%) Microtus hartingi kidney samples and confirmed by nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) o...

Background: The genus Pestivirus in the family Flaviviridae comprises the members bovine viral diarrhea virus type 1 (BVDV-1), classical swine fever virus and border disease virus. The BVDV enveloped and the genome is a single-strand positive sense RNA molecule of approximately 12.3 kilobases in length. The genome is transcribed as a single open re...

The maedi-visna virus (MVV) classified as a lentivirus of the retroviridae family, causes a very common economically important disease in sheep, in many parts of the worlds. Presences of the infection in Turkey have been shown by researches in previous studies. In this study all blood samples were examined by ELISA and PCR to detect MVV antibody an...

Border diseases virus causes economical loss in the sheep flocks and have high seroprevalence in the world. In the study 1075 samples from 25 sheep flocks obtained from Kirikkale and all district in the province of Kirikkale (Turkey) were used. Antibodies against pestivirus detected in 74.51% of 1075 sera samples using ELISA. However, range of sero...

In this study, we investigated the changes occurring in the activities of determining the biochemical and hematological parameters in persistently infected sheep with border disease virus (BDV) and control sheep. While cholesterol, aspartate aminotransferase, lactate dehydrogenase, high-density lipoprotein, and glucose parameters were found to be s...

Background: Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) in cattle is a very common viral infection that causes economic losses. In acute infection fever, leucopenia and thrombocytopenia may be observed. BVDV, an enveloped, single-stranded positive RNA virus, is a member of the genus pestiviruses within the family of flaviviridae. Vaccination and eradication...

Viral infections cause important problems and significant economic loses in sheep and goats that can be protected by an investigation of infections. This study aimed to determine the sheep and goat viral infections including bluetongue virus (BTV), maedi-visna virus (MVV) and caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus (CAEV) in Kirikkale city located in...

Tularemia is a zoonotic disease caused by Francisella tularensis which can be transmitted to humans by tick bites contaminated water handling infected materials and inhalation. The different clinical types are ulceroglandular, glandular, oropharyngeal, oculoglandular, typhoidal and pneumonic tularemia. Streptomycin and tetracycline are commonly use...

Allergy is a Th2-mediated disease that involves the formation of specific IgE antibodies against innocuous environmental substances. The prevalence of allergic diseases has dramatically increased over the past decades, affecting up to 30% of the population in industrialized countries. The understanding of mechanisms underlying allergic diseases as...

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection of the cornea culminates in an immunopathological lesion (stromal keratitis--SK) that impairs vision. This report shows that HSV infection results in IL-23 up-regulation, but if this response fails to occur, as was noted in p19-/- mice, the severity of lesions, their incidence and the level of viral induced angi...

Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) is a tick-borne virus in the family Bunyaviridae, genus Nairovirus. The virus is transmitted to humans through infected tick bites or from direct contact with viremic animals or humans. In the present study, a total of 1,015 adult ticks were collected from cattle (603 specimens), sheep (17 specimens), a...

After ocular infection, HSV-specific CD8+ T cells migrate to and are specifically retained in the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal ganglia (TG) even at the time when replicating virus is no longer evident. Virus-specific CD8+ T cells maintain an activation phenotype and secrete IFN-gamma in the latent TG. In this report we demonstrated that acti...

In this study, we assessed the efficacy of the specific knockdown of matrix metalloprotein-9 (MMP-9) in vitro and in vivo using short hairpin RNA (shRNA) against MMP-9. Two plasmids were generated encoding shRNA (pshRNA) targeted against two distinct MMP-9 gene sequences. Transfection of these pshMMP-9s could be shown to specifically inhibit MMP-9...

CD4(+)CD25(+) regulatory T cells (T(reg)) can inhibit a variety of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, but their involvement in regulating virus-induced immunopathology is not known. We have evaluated the role of T(reg) in viral immunopathological lesion stromal keratitis. This frequent cause of human blindness results from a T cell-mediated immu...

This report seeks a means of maximizing memory CD8 T cell responses to peptide immunization. Delivery of the CD8 peptide epitope by stress protein, heat shock protein (hsp)70, results in excellent immunogenicity at the acute phase but memory responses were poor both in terms of the number of responding cells as well as their functional avidity. We...

In this study, the matrix (M) gene of the RBOK vaccine strain of rinderpest (RPV) was amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and cloned into TOPO® XL cloning vector. For this purpose. Vero cells were infected with the RBOK vaccine strain of RPV and total RNA was obtained from the infected cells. cDNA of the matrix gene was obtained by reverse...