PRESENCE OF RABBIT HEMORRHAGIC-DISEASE VIRUS-ANTIGEN IN RABBIT-TISSUES AS REVEALED BY A MONOCLONAL-ANTIBODY DEPENDENT CAPTURE ELISA

The production of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to a common antigenic r egion on rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) has enabled the deve lopment of a capture ELISA for virus detection. The assay was shown to detect reliably the presence of viral antigen in crude homogenates of a range of rabbit tissues and has provided the first evidence for the presence of RHDV in blood, serum and heart tissue. A limited time cou rse study of the progression of virus infection revealed viral antigen is first detected in the liver at between 18 and 24 h post-infection (p.i.) and in the spleen between 24 and 30 h p.i. The assay displayed a high level of specificity, clearly differentiating between groups of infected (lowest observed optical density (O.D.) 0.45) and uninfected (highest O.D. 0.06) rabbits. No viral antigen was detected in the uri ne or faeces collected from infected rabbits at post-mortem. Experimen ts employing the 'spiking' of pools of urine and faecal homogenates co llected from uninfected rabbits, with a known amount of virus, indicat ed that RHDV may not be present in the faeces of infected animals and if present in urine, it appears to undergo substantial degradation.