Serologic (Antibody Detection) Methods

For communicable diseases, clinical management, and public health response, it is often important to know the body's immune response following exposure and infection with pathogens. Although humoral and cell-mediated immunity both play roles in the body's specific immunity against viral pathogens, testing antibody response for humoral immunity is much more common and is also easier in clinical virology laboratories than testing for cell-mediated immunity because of the convenience of antibody serological testing methods. There is a long history of using various serologic methods in clinical virology laboratories for antibody detection. Some methods, such as complement fixation test and immunodiffusion test, have been gradually phased out and replaced by faster and less laborious methods (1, 2). In this chapter, we will focus on antibody detection methods used in clinical virology laboratories: neutralization, hemagglutination inhibition, indirect immunofluorescence, enzyme immunoassay, and Western blot.