Background:
Newcastle disease (ND) is a highly contagious viral disease of poultry causing huge economic loss due to outbreaks, mortality, drop in egg production etc., ND is presently controlled by multiple doses of repeated vaccination of both live and killed vaccines of different pathotypes. Outbreaks are quite common even after these measures due to failure in vaccine, vaccination methods and evolving virulent strains. ND specific serum antibodies are induced by vaccines and are protective. Hence, Sero-monitoring of poultry flocks is helpful in assessing their immune status to assess the need of booster vaccine and also to diagnose the virulent ND strain challenges etc. ELISA technology is highly sensitive and specific for quantifying the ND specific antibody titer in the serum. Conventional ELISA involves bulk propagation of ND virus and virus concentration by ultracentrifugation, making the procedure tedious and costly. The current technology exempts the virus concentration procedure and hence, less costly and user friendly. It is more sensitive than currently employed Hemagglutination Inhibition assay (HI). Technology Details:
The Concanavalin A ELISA kit is highly cost effective, has excellent sensitivity and specificity. The kit performs with single serum dilution, hence 46 samples in duplicate can be analyzed in single ELISA plate. The kit is useful for poultry industry in (i) assessing quality and efficacy of the ND vaccine used; (ii) to ensure the efficacy of vaccination method followed (iii) to monitor the protective status of birds against ND (iv) to ascertain the need of booster vaccination and its timing (v) to diagnose the NDV field virus outbreak.