Standard diagnostic test of the vesicular stomatitis stomatitis

TH Chen*, CH Pan,F Lee, YL Lin, ML Wang, CN Shih, WL Yu, TS Huang, HJ Tsai

Animal Health Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan

Abstract

There are three pig vesicular diseases which are difficult to differentiate clinically vesicular stomatitis (VS), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and swine vesicular disease (SVD). However, recombinant envelope glycoprotein (GP) and nucleocapsid protein (N) of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), including serotypes of New Jersey and Indiana, can be employed as differential diagnostic tool. The antigenic domains on these recombinant proteins are highly immunogenic. Our study aimed to develop both competitive and indirect ELISAs for the detection of antibodies against VSV according to the Manual of Diagnostic Tests and Vaccines for Terrestrial Animals published by OIE in 2010. Standards for competitive and indirect ELISAs have been established based on numerous factors, such as convenience, stability, sensitivity, specificity and safety. Testing anti-VSV antibodies using VSV-infected bovine and horse sera, analysis sensitivity and specificity reached 10-3.0 fold, while diagnostic sensitivity and specificity tested around 94.0% and 90.0%, respectively. The results indicated that both ELISA protocols could detect anti-VSV antibodies in the serum samples without cross-reacting with the anti-FMDV antibodies; thus, they would be useful as serological differential tools for vesicular diseases.

Key words: vesicular stomatitis (VS), antibody detection, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).