Various conventional RT-PCR protocols for the diagnostic amplification of lyssavirus genome fragments have been published (Tables 1-3 ). Since primers were selected from conserved regions of the genome, most assays amplify parts of the nucleoprotein (N-) gene as earlier proposed [15] . In generic approaches intended to detect all lyssaviruses either hemi-nested or fully nested amplifications are used and have applications for both antemortem (saliva, CSF, brain) and postmortem samples (principally brain tissue) ( Table 2 ). Some of these diagnostic procedures are also applied for further virus characterization, including sequencing reactions [16] or restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) [17] . Also, strain-specific RT-PCRs have been developed to distinguish various rabies virus (RABV) strains in a particular region [18] .