Development and validation of sensitive real-time RT-PCR assay for broad detection of rabies virus

•Two reliable real-time quantitative RT-PCR assays were developed for RABV detection.•Primer and probe sets were targeted to highly conserved regions in nucleoprotein and polymerase.•Sensitivity ranged between 100 to 10 standard RNA copies per reaction for N-gene and L-gene assays, respectively.•These assays can be successfully applied on African isolates for research and diagnostic.