Rapid active assay for the detection of antibodies to West Nile virus in chickens.

To reduce the assay time for detecting virus-specific antibodies in serum, we developed microarray-based active immunoassay techniques for detecting West Nile virus (WNV)-specific IgM molecules in chicken blood. The assay uses electrophoretic concentration of IgM molecules onto WNV antigens arrayed on a dialysis membrane followed by detection of bound IgM molecules with functionalized magnetic beads as active labels. This assay takes only 15 minutes and has the same sensitivity as a commercially available human WNV IgM antibody-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (commonly called a MAC-ELISA) modified for use with chicken sera.