Diagnostic evaluation of assays for detection of antibodies against porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) in pigs exposed to different PEDV strains

Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) has caused economic losses in the Americas, Asia and Europe in recent years. Reliable serological assays are essential for epidemiological studies and vaccine evaluation. The objective of this study was to compare the ability of five enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) to detect antibodies against different PEDV strains in pig serum. A total of 732 serum samples from North American or European pigs were tested. Samples included experimental samples from pigs infected with classical (G1a PEDV) or variant genogroup 1 PEDV (G1b PEDV), pandemic genogroup 2 PEDV (G2b PEDV) or non-infected controls. Field samples from herds with confirmed or unknown PEDV exposure were also used. Three indirect ELISAs based on G2b antigens (ELISAs 1, 2 and 3), a competitive ELISA based on the G2b antigen (ELISA 4) and a competitive ELISA based on the G1a antigen (ELISA 5) were compared. Overall, the tests had a moderate agreement (κ = 0.61). G1a PEDV infected pigs were earliest detected by ELISA 3, G1b PEDV infected pigs were earliest detected by ELISAs 4 and 5 and the performance of all tests was similar for the G2b PEDV group. ELISA 1 showed the overall lowest detection on experimentally and field derived samples. Diagnostic sensitivity and specificity with a 95% probability interval were estimated to be 68.2% (62.1–74.4%) and 97.5% (95.2–99.0%) for ELISA 1, 73.7% (71.5–79.6%) and 98.4% (96.6–99.5%) for ELISA 2, 86.2% (81.1–90.6%) and 91.6% (87.7–94.8%) for ELISA 3, 78.3% (72.8–83.5%) and 99.7% (98.2–100%) for ELISA 4, and 93.5% (90.3–96.0%) and 91.2% (83.8–97.9%) for ELISA 5. Differences in detection among assays seem to be more related to intrinsic factors of an assay than to the PEDV antigen used.