Establishment of an Indirect ELISA for Bovine Infectious Rhinotracheitis Based on Eukaryotic Expression of gD Protein

Anyan Li1,2, Shimei Xu2, Ting Li2

  • 1College of Veterinary Medicine, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou 730070, China.

Veterinary Sciences
|July 28, 2026
PubMed

To develop an indirect ELISA kit for detecting serum antibodies against bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1), the gD protein of BoHV-1 was expressed in CHO-S cells and purified for use as the coating antigen. The optimized conditions were as follows: a coating antigen concentration of 2 µg/mL; serum dilution at 1:40 with incubation at 37 °C for 60 min; enzyme-labeled antibody dilution at 1:5000 with incubation at 37 °C for 60 min; and color development with TMB substrate at 37 °C for 15 min. The absorbance was then measured with a microplate reader. The kit could detect BoHV-1-positive serum at a dilution of up to 1:3200, showing favorable analytical detection capacity. No cross-reactivity was observed with positive sera against bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), Akabane virus (AKAV), bovine parainfluenza virus type 3 (BPIV3), or lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV), reflecting ideal analytical specificity. Based on 126 field serum samples tested against a commercial IDEXX gB-based ELISA kit, we further calculated the diagnostic sensitivity (83.54%; 95% CI: 73.22-90.17%) and diagnostic specificity (100%; 95% CI: 92.43-100%) to quantitatively characterize its clinical detection performance. The ROC curve analysis based on IDEXX gB serostatus rather than true VNT-confirmed infection generated an AUC of 0.912 (95% CI: 0.856-0.951), which only reflects inter-assay concordance instead of absolute diagnostic validity. This indirect ELISA can be applied to epidemiological investigation and evaluation of immunization efficacy.