Abstract
In a quantitative complement fixation test, antisera of rabbits immunized with complexes of PolyA·PolyU and methylated bovine serum albumin (MBSA), or with those of PolyI·PolyC and MBSA, which had been shown to react specifically with double-stranded RNA, were allowed to react with two kinds of bulk nucleic acids from the rice dwarf virus (RDV)-infected rice plants and from the healthy rice plants. The reactivity with the healthy rice plant-samples was very weak but in the infected rice plant-samples sixty-sixfold greater reactivity was found. To ascertain whether the reactive material in the infected rice plant-samples was RDV-RNA, both bulk nucleic acids from the healthy and the infected rice plants were fractionated by methylated albumin kieselguhr (MAK) column chromatography into RDV-RNA, tRNA, rRNA and DNA, and then the reactivity of each fraction was examined. Most of the reactivity was observed with RDV-RNA fraction.
Thus the immunological method was demonstrated to be a useful tool for detection of RDV-RNA even in the presence of a great excess of other nucleic acid forms in the RDV-infected rice plants.
