Several scientific studies support the claim that natural scrapie is associated with polymorphisms at three codons within the sheep prion protein (PrP) gene. Genotyping of these codons (codon 136 [alanine, valine], 154 [arginine, histidine], and 171 [glutamine, arginine, histidine]) might enable breeding of sheep flocks with high resistance to scrapie. Fast and reliable high-throughput genotyping of sheep is a major issue, since scrapie is a serious problem in several European countries. To address this, an experimental procedure for DNA preparation and PCR-based detection of codon 136, 154, and 171 polymorphisms was established. more