Conglutinating complement adsorption test as applied to foot and mouth disease.

The phenomenon of conglutination was first reported by Ehrlich and Sachs (1902), and subsequently received attention from Bordet and Gay (1906) and Bordet and Streng (1909). However, a systematic study of the mechanisms involved did not appear until Coombs and associates, in a commendable series of papers, reviewed the earlier work (Hole and Coombs, 1947a), applied the test to certain virus systems (Stoker, Coombs, and Bedson, 1950), and studied the components and their interactions (Coombs, Blomfield, and Roberts, 1950; Coombs and Coombs, 1953; Coombs, 1954). These studies have demonstrated that each serum acts differently to various species of complement and the level of antibody measured may be influenced by the amount of complement adsorbed. Certain antigen-antibody complexes adsorb one complement to a greater degree than another, and if that complement is conglutinating rather than hemolytic the conglutinating complement adsorption test is more sensitive. Solovieff (1943) and Bier, Furtado, and Cisalpino (1957) investigated the application of the conglutination test to foot and mouth disease systems. Solovieff reported satisfactory results for diagnosing foot and mouth disease, giving fewer doubtful reactions than the hemolytic complement fixation test. Only one dilution of serum was used and a description of the antigen was not available. Bier et al. developed a micro plate technique which was satisfactory for virus typing. Neither method was utilized to assay antibody content of immune serum. This paper describes the applicability of the conglutinating complement adsorption test to various foot and mouth disease antigen-antibody systems and reports the relative value of the conglutinating complement adsorption and hemolytic complement fixation tests as methods to assay the antibody content of rabbit, guinea pig,