The study presented here was conducted to evaluate the performance of a double-antigen sandwich ELISA to detect antibodies in human serum against the coronavirus associated with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). A recombinant partial nucleocapsid protein of SARS-associated coronavirus was used as a serodiagnostic antigen in the ELISA. A total of 2892 clinical serum samples were tested with the ELISA kit, which positively identified 25 of 35 (71.4%) samples of patients with confirmed SARS infection, 286 of 407 (70%) samples of patients suspected of having SARS, 229 of 302 (75.8%) samples of convalescent SARS patients, and 0 of 544 samples obtained from healthcare workers; only 1 of 1604 clinical samples obtained from patients with other diseases demonstrated a weakly positive result. These results indicate that the double-antigen sandwich ELISA is an effective screening method for the serodiagnosis of SARS-associated coronavirus.

A double antibody sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (DAS-ELISA) for detection of the soft-shelled turtle iridovirus (STIV) was developed using a specific monoclonal antibody (mAb) against STIV and anti-STIV rabbit serum. Using DAS-ELISA, the detection limit of STIV was found to be 10(3)PFU/ml. The positive rate of 15 STIV samples was 100%, while the positive rate of 100 other aquatic virus samples was 0%. These data show that DAS-ELISA is highly specific and sensitive for the detection of STIV. In clinical tests, 128 samples isolated from pond-reared turtles were subjected to DAS-ELISA and PCR. The overall agreement between the results obtained by DAS-ELISA and PCR was 98.4%. The results indicate that the DAS-ELISA method could be used for diagnosing diseases caused by STIV.