Virus-Neutralizing and Passively Protective Monoclonal Antibodies to Infectious Bursal Disease Virus of Chickens

Murine monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) were produced to assist in the identification and characterization of the virus-neutralizing epitopes of infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV). Only MAbs that reacted in Western blotting with viral protein 2 (VP2) or immunoprecipitated VP2 neutralized the infectivity of the virus in cell culture and passively protected young chickens from infection. Three of the neutralizing MAbs did not react with denatured viral proteins. Additivity enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays indicated that the six virus-neutralizing MAbs recognized two spatially independent epitopes. The ability of two of the virus-neutralizing MAbs to neutralize a variant of IBDV that had escaped neutralization by all the other MAbs confirmed the existence of two distinct neutralizing epitopes. The results support the hypothesis that there are at least two non-overlapping epitopes recognized by the virus-neutralizing MAbs reported in this study, although these may still be within one conformational site on VP2 of IBDV.