THE USE OF HOMOLOGOUS AND HETEROLOGOUS ANTIGENS IN HEMMAGLUTINATION-INHIBITION (HI) TEST FOR DETECTION OF ANTIBODIES AGAINST NEWCASTLE DISEASE VIRUS IN VACCINATED AND EXPERIMENTALLY INFECTED PIGEONS (Columba livia)

Newcastle Disease (ND), caused by Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) is one of the most devastating diseases of the domestic fowl. Domestic pigeon (Columba livia) are related as host and disseminating of ND to poultry and wild birds, but some aspects of epidemiology are still unclear. In this study, conventional microtiter hemagglutination inhibition (HI) test was performed to evaluate the antibodies production of experimentally infected pigeons with a pathogenic strain of NDV and vaccinated pigeons with live vaccine strains LaSota and Ulster. The tests were performed using two different antigens to evaluate the possible differences between the results. The use of different antigens had influenced the HI test results for both experimentally infected and vaccinated pigeons. While higher HI titers of experimentally infected pigeons were obtained using LaSota as antigen, the opposite was observed with vaccinated pigeons, where the occurrence of higher titers were observed using Ulster as antigen. Our data suggest that these  aspects should be considered in HI tests procedure, in order to obtain results closer to the real immune response of birds infected with NDV. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.17525/vrr.v15i1.41