Canine Distemper (CD) is one of the pathologies that causes the highest rate of morbidity and mortality in domestic canines worldwide and also represents an important disease in several families of terrestrial mammals: Canidae, Procyonidae, Mustelidae, Mephitidae, Hyaenidae, Ursidae, Ailuridae, Viverridae, Felidae and some marine mammals the cape seal (pusa caspica). This disease is caused by Canine Distemper virus (CDV), a single-stranded RNA virus and negative polarity, whose genome consists of six genes, codes for six structural proteins. Among them, the Hemagglutinin encoded by the H gene, has the highest amino acid variability, induces the production of neutralizing antibodies synthesized by the host immune system. Based on the variability of the H gene, it has been described that worldwide there would be at least fourteen lineages different from the CDV and in our country has been described the presence of at least two lineages circulating among our sick dogs with the pathology: America-1 and Europe.

Thus, the objective of this report was to implement the detection of the America-1 lineage of the Canine Distemper Virus by means of the Polymerase Chain Reaction associated with reverse transcription (RT-PCR) by means of in silico-designed primers. For this, the access numbers of the described nucleotide sequences were used in a phylogenetic tree constructed using the CDV H gene as target (Ke et al., 2015) and stored in the Genbank® database.

The designed primers were found to be effective for CDV detection and the RT-PCR was able to detect a specific fragment of the H gene from the positive samples, therefore it could be suggested that these in silico-designed primers can effectively be used to detect the America-1 lineage.