The effect of antiserum quality on strain specificity assessment of foot and mouth disease virus by the neutralization reaction.

The factors affecting the virus strain specificity of antibody to foot an mouth disease virus prepared by a variety of protocols in several species were evaluated by neutralization tests. The time at which the serum was taken, the antigen dose given, whether or not revaccination had occurred and the animal species in which the sera were prepared, did not appear to affect the strain specificity of serum prepared to inactivated antigens when measured in neutralization tests, probably because of the restricted nature of the antigenic site involved. However, variation was observed with convalescent animal sera or sera from animals which had received trypsin cleaved virus were used. For these reasons banks of reference antisera are prepared as pooled sera using one or two inoculations of inactivated antigen.