Establishment and validation of a liquid-phase blocking ELISA for the detection of antibodies elicited by the foot-and-mouth disease virus A/ASIA/Sea-97 lineage

It has been reported that a commercial solid-phase competition ELISA (SPCE) commonly used in year-round serum surveillance in South Korea may not be sufficient for use in the sero-monitoring of protective antibody responses following vaccination. Here, we established a liquid-phase blocking ELISA (LPBE) method based on the purified 146S antigen of the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) A/Yeoncheon/SKR/2017 strain, and its analytical performance was assessed using a wide range of pig sera. The established LPBE performed well regardless of whether antisera were elicited by a homologous (A/Yeoncheon/SKR/2017) or heterologous virus (A/Pocheon/SKR/2010) classified in the A/ASIA/Sea-97 lineage. The LPBE performance was also assessed using sera obtained from pigs in the field that underwent routine vaccination, demonstrating that the assay exhibited higher consistency with the virus neutralization test (standard reference test) than the commercial SPCE. This suggested that the LPBE performed well for antisera induced by the FMDV serotype A vaccine strains used in South Korea, namely, A(22)/IRQ/24/64, A/Argentina/2001 + A(24)/Cruzeiro and A/Zabaikalsky/2013. Overall, the established LPBE is considered to be a convenient serological assay for use in postvaccination sero-monitoring.