Recently LSD spread to eastern and south-eastern European countries. comprised of sheeppox virus (SPPV), goatpox virus (GTPV) and Rabbit Polyclonal to TLE4 lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV). These three double stranded DNA viruses of approximately 150 kbp (Tulman et al., 2002), are the causative agents of severe and contagious diseases in sheep, goats and cattle respectively (Babiuk et ABT-046 al., 2008). Although mortality rates of SPPV and GTPV are generally higher than for LSDV, all three diseases have serious socio-economic impact (Bhanuprakash et al., 2006; Tuppurainen and Oura, 2012). The latter is due to the production losses (reduced milk yield and weight gain, increased abortion rates, damage to wool and hides) and loss of traction (in case of LSDV). Their economic impact and distribution warrants the notifiable status of these diseases in the European Union (Council Directive 82/894/EEC, Commission Decision 89/162/EEC) and by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). During the last decades capripox viruses have displayed an emerging distribution pattern. LSDV originally confined to southern part of Africa has travelled north- and eastward. It reached Egypt in 1988 (Ali et al., 1990) and Israel in 1989 (Yeruham et al., 1995). It has established itself in the Middle East with virus circulations reported since the 1990s (for example: Kuwait 1991 and 2014, Lebanon 1993, United Arab Emirates 2000, Oman 2010 and Iran 2014). Recently LSD spread to eastern and south-eastern European countries. First cases of LSDV in Turkey were reported in 2013 and it spread to Cyprus in 2014 and to Greece in 2015. The virus travelled northeast through the Caucasus, affecting Azerbaijan (2014), Armenia and the Russian Federation (2015) and Georgia and Kazakhstan (2016). In 2016 it spread through different Balkan countries (i.e. Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro) (Tasioudi et al., 2016; FAO, 2017). The availability and quality of diagnostic tools are often a determining factor for the efficacy of disease control, eradication or prevention. During the last years significant advances have been made in the virological part of the diagnostics with the development of capripox specific real-time PCRs with associated high sensitivity and specificity (Balinsky et al., 2008; Bowden et al., 2008; Lamien et al., 2011; Haegeman et al., 2013). In contrast, the serological tools have been addressed less. Although high levels of specificity for capripox can be obtained with the virus neutralisation test (VNT), sensitivity can vary between 70C96% (Sadri et al., 2002; Gari et al., 2008; Babiuk et al., 2009) which could provide problems detecting low levels of antibodies. Only recently, one ELISA kit ABT-046 has been commercialized and although the initial data are promising, its true potential still needs to be evaluated in the field. Several in-house ELISA systems have been developed either based upon the use of peptides (Tian et al., 2010), whole (inactivated) virus (Babuik et al., 2009) or purified / recombinant proteins such as P32 (Bhanot et al., 2009; Bowden et al., 2009). Although these ELISAs attain high levels of specificity/sensitivity, the dataset for some of these tests is relatively low and need therefore further validation to ascertain their performance characteristics. Coating of plates with protein or whole virus require sufficient amounts of high quality stabilized antigen and the production hereof is challenging and needs sophisticated lab equipment. The accompanying quality controls and biosafety requirements make it less suited to be employed in ABT-046 less equipped laboratories which is an important issue considering the distribution of the capripox viruses. Immunoperoxidase Monolayer Assays (IPMAs) have been developed/compared for a large number of viruses such as swine influenza (Direksin et al., 2002), ABT-046 swine hepatitis E (Liang et al., 2014), porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2) (Pileri et al., 2014), vaccinia virus (Gerber et al., 2012), African swine fever (Afayoa et al., 2014), etc. The benefits of the test are: the simplicity in execution, the basic equipment requirements and the lack of large amounts of (purified) antigen needed without comprising the sensitivity (Pileri et al., 2014) and specificity. It was therefore the purpose of this study to develop an IPMA capable of detecting LSDV antibodies in a relatively low-tech environment, which is cost-effective and more rapid than the current VNTs without additional biosafety requirements. In addition, the potential to rapidly adapt the.