Detection of antibodies to human T-lymphotropic virus type I by using synthetic peptides.

We describe an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for antibodies to HTLV-I using synthetic peptides corresponding to antigenic regions of HTLV-I structural protein. We observed that the peptides amino acid 100-119, 100-130, 131-160 and 295-314 of the gag protein, and 89-115, 175-199, 350-386 and 458-488 on the env protein correspond to the antigenic regions of HTLV-I structural protein. In particular, the peptide corresponding to amino acid 100-130 of the gag protein reacted with antibodies in all sera from HTLV-I carriers diagnosed by particle agglutination assay (PA) and indirect immunofluorescence assay (IF), but did not react with sera from healthy volunteers judged to be negative by PA and IF. Our results indicate that the ELISA using the peptide 100-130 of the gag protein can be used for donor screening of HTLV-I antibodies.