Special tests for the diagnosis of infectious causes of reproductive failure in ruminants.

The detection of many infectious disease agents, including those of importance in ruminant reproductive failure, increasingly will be achieved through means other than the laborious and time-consuming traditional isolation and culture procedures. New diagnostic methodologies are designed both to enhance the rapidity with which results are obtained and to increase specificity and sensitivity of identification of the causative agent. Immunoenzyme histochemical staining of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues offers, especially in cases of abortions in which necropsy material routinely is examined histologically, an efficient and timely means of identifying many important pathogens. Antemortem serologic diagnostics will continue to be dominated by ELISA technologies. In the past decade, the specificity of serodiagnosis has been enhanced greatly by the use of monoclonal antibody-based competitive ELISA systems and further improvements in such methods will result from the use of defined antigens derived by recombinant DNA techniques. Although DNA hybridization technology has been applied successfully to detect many important veterinary pathogens and has been shown to have merit for improved diagnosis of some fastidious agents, those methods, because of their technical complexity, in general, have not been shown to be applicable for routine diagnostic uses. In contrast, methods using the PCR for specific gene amplification offer exceptional promise. Although the PCR presently is too technically exacting for routine use, its broad applicability and exquisite sensitivity and specificity suggest that it will play an ever-increasing role in future veterinary diagnostic techniques.