Biodetection data: Using odor signature in white-tailed deer associated with infection by Chronic Wasting Disease prions

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) has become a major concern amongst those involved in managing wild and captive cervid populations. CWD is a fatal, highly transmissible spongiform encephalopathy caused by an abnormally folded protein, called a prion. Prions are present in a number of tissues, including feces and urine in CWD infected animals, suggesting multiple modes of transmission, including animal-to-animal, environmental, and fomite. CWD management is complicated by the lack of a practical, non-invasive, live-animal screening tests. This study involved training canine biodetectors in 2021-2022, to identify populations and/or individuals infected with CWD via detection of feces odors. Dogs were trained to detect and discriminate CWD infected white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) from non-infected white-tailed deer, obtained from targeted removal events conducted throughout the United States and several counties in western Tennessee, in a laboratory setting at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. Dogs were also transitioned from alerting to fecal samples to whole body odor using different sections of gastrointestinal tracts. This data publication provides data that describe the 1-in-5 bioassay for each experiments. Data include accuracy of dogs in training (January-August 2021), discrimination of feces from CWD infected white-tailed deer (August-September 2021), and transition to detection of CWD-positive volatile odors in tissue samples (October 2022).
We hypothesized that the success of dogs in detecting avian influenza virus infection in mallard fecal samples could be repeated using dogs to detect fecal samples from CWD infected in comparison to non-infected white-tailed deer. We also conducted an experiment to determine if dogs could generalize what they learned from the odor of fecal samples from CWD infected deer to other body tissues (i.e., small intestine).
For more information about this study and these data, see Golden et al. (2024).