A Multiple Antigen Direct Elisa For Diagnosing

Equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV) is a retrovirus that causes a chronic infection in horses. In theabsence of a vaccine, the control of this disease depends on the diagnosis and elimination of infectedhorses. Currently approved diagnostic procedures utilize agar gel diffusion (AGID), or enzyme-linkedimmunosorbant (ELISA) methodologies to detect antibodies against the virus in horse sera as evidenceof infection. Although the AGID procedure has been the industry standard, it is inherently lesssensitive, much slower, and subject to considerable variation in interpretation, when compared toELISA methods. Current ELISA methods utilize either a direct sandwich procedure based on asynthetic peptide corresponding to a region of the small envelope glycoprotein, or an antibodycompetition format utilizing monoclonal antibodies directed against the major core protein (p-26) of thevirus. In either case, a single antigen is used. The major problem with the current ELISA assays is theobservation that each misses some positive samples. In addition, the competition ELISA is prone tofalse positives. This project is aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of combining recombinant proteinmethodology, synthetic peptides, and a novel conjugation procedure to make a rapid, sensitive, andspecific diagnostic test for this important viral pathogen of horses.