Development of a sandwich Dot-ELISA for detecting bovine viral diarrhea virus antigen with E2 recombinant protein

The IgG antibodies of rabbit anti-E2 protein of the bovine viral diarrhea virus were prepared by a general method from high efficiency serum immunized by E2 recombinant protein antigen expressed in E. coli prokaryotic expression system and were labeled to make enzyme-labeled antibody with the method of NaIO 4 . A sandwich Dot enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (Dot-ELISA) for the detection of BVDV was developed. The optimal reaction conditions of Dot-ELISA were determined. The results show that optimal coating antibody was 300 μg·mL −1 , the working concentration of HRP-labeled antibody was 1:50. The optimal blocking reagent and time were 5% bovine serum and 45 min. The minimum detection of the content of antigen reached 1.35 μg·mL −1 . Compared with the routine IDEXX ELISA test kit with the whole virus, its specificity, sensitivity and coincidence rate were 90.48%, 96.55% and 95.24%, respectively. Compared with the sandwich Dot-ELISA with the negative staining electron microscope and RT-PCR, the coincidence rates were 90.9% and 93.1%, respectively. In addition, Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) antigen of 178 samples collected from cow farms in the Hebei Province, China, were detected by the developed Dot-ELISA and the IDEXX BVDV antigen Test Kit simultaneously, BVDV antigen positive rate was 39.89%–41.01%. The result of detecting clinical samples demonstrated that the established method showed its specificity, sensitivity and repeatability, whereas the results were easily interpreted without an ELISA reader.