Precipitating antibodies to extractable nuclear antigens are important in the diagnosis of connective tissue diseases. Disease associations are defined using gel based techniques. Alternative technologies have been introduced, including passive haemagglutination, enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, and western blotting. This leader contains a review of the literature on the clinical usefulness o...

Radial haemolysis (RH) for assaying rubella antibody was studied in parallel tests with haemagglutination-inhibition (HAI) on 1102 sera from adult women. Simple to perform and economical in reagents, the RH test is as sensitive as the HAI test and is a useful method of screening antenatal and other sera for rubella immunity. It detects IgG but not IgM antibody.

Newcastle disease virus (NDV) was isolated from a field outbreak in pigeons. The virus was characterized by haemagglutination test (HA) and confirmed by haemagglutination inhibition test (HAI). The pathotyping was done by mean death time (MDT), intracerebral pathogenicity index (ICPI) and intravenous pathogenicity index (IVPI). The ELD50 of the velogenic strain was 10/0.1 ml. Thirty-nine pigeon...

Antisera to hCG were incubated with living human spermatozoa. Agglutination and complement-dependent immobilization of the spermatozoa occurred with the anti-hCG sera but not with control sera. The antisera also reacted with human blood cells. The anti-sperm activities were largely removed by absorbing the sera with human blood cells, although these absorptions had no apparent effect on the ant...