Diagnostic Application of Monoclonal Antibody (MAb)-Based Sandwich ELISAs

The advantages of microtiter-based ELISAs in diagnostic techniques can be briefly summarized by the economic use of reagents and by the ease of their application to large numbers of test samples. ELISAs are widely applied to the serological diagnosis of both human and animal bacterial and mycoplasmal disease, but similar assays for the diagnostic detection of antigen rather than antibody are not as commonly used. Although many antigen-capture or sandwich ELISAs have been developed, their application has been largely confined to research. This is mainly owing to their limited sensitivity in comparison with standard culture techniques. This means that pre-enrichment is inevitably necessary before testing to achieve an acceptable sensitivity.