Development of practical ELISA for detection of antibodies to bovine leukemia virus: A comparison of its sensitivity with that of virus neutralization and agar gel immunodiffusion tests.

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Abstract
An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for detecting antibodies to bovine leukemia virus (BLV) was developed by using BLV antigens purified by sucrose density gradient centrifugation. Serum adsorption tests with glycoprotein (gp) and protein (p) antigens of BLV revealed that the ELISA detected antibodies to both gp and p antigens. The method has higher senitivity than the agar gel immunodiffusion (AGID) and virus neutralization (VN) tests, and detected antibodies to BLV earlier than the AGID test in cattle infected experimentally with BLV. Comparison between ELISA and AGID test for detecting antibodies to BLV using 1060 sera collected from BLV-infected herds revealed that all AGID-positive sera (446) reacted positively by ELISA and 21 (3.4%) and 33 (5.4%) sera which were negative by the AGID test were positive and equivocal, respectively, by ELISA. Most of these positive sera were also positive in the VN test. Advantages of ELISA system were discussed in comparison with the AGID tests.