Comparison of plaque reduction and focus reduction neutralization tests for the measurement of neutralizing antibody titers against japanese encephalitis virus

Abstract

Japanese encephalitis is prevalent throughout the temperate and tropical regions of Asia and is caused by the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), a mosquito-borne viral pathogen. The plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT) is currently recommended as the gold standard test for detecting human antibodies against JEV. The plaque assay is the most widely used method for detecting infectious virions and involves counting discrete plaques in cells. However, it is time-consuming, and results can be subjective (owing to analyst variability during manual plaque counting). The focus reduction neutralization test (FRNT), which is based on an immuno-colorimetric assay, can be used to automatically count foci formed by the JEV. Here, we compared the efficacy of PRNT and FRNT in measuring the neutralizing antibody titers using 102 serum samples from vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. We observed positive correlations between these neutralization assays against the Nakayama and Beijing strains (R2 = 0.98 and 0.77, respectively). Thus, FRNT may be preferable to PRNT for evaluating the efficacy of JEV vaccines in large-scale serological studies.