Evaluation of a caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus/maedivisna virus indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in the serological diagnosis of ovine progressive pneumonia virus in U.S. sheep. Clin. Vaccine Immunol

A caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus (CAEV)/maedi-visna virus (MVV) indirect enzyme-linked immunosor-bent assay (iELISA) was validated with samples from U.S. sheep and by the use of radioimmunoprecipitation as the standard for comparison. The sensitivity and the specificity were 86.0 % (5.8%) and 95.9 % (2.9%), respectively. The iELISA format and phylogenetic differences based on the MVV gag sequence contribute to the reduced sensitivity. The diagnosis of small ruminant lentivirus (SRLV) infec-tions in sheep and goats is most commonly determined by the detection of anti-SRLV antibodies in serum by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) that is typically created by the use of maedi-visna virus (MVV) or caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus (CAEV) isolates from sheep or goats of a given region or country (1). ELISA formats are typically vali-dated against reference standard tests, including the agar gel immunodiffusion (AGID) assay, the radioimmunoprecipita-tion (IP) assay, or Western blot analysis. Although most sero