Porcine leukocyte interferon exhibits close antigenic relatedness to human interferon alpha 2, but not to human interferon alpha 1.

As reported by others using polyclonal antisera, natural human and porcine interferons (IFN)-alpha are antigenically related. Using monoclonal antibodies (mAb) in neutralization and ELISA experiments, we found differences in the subtype/antigenic composition between virus-induced porcine and human leukocyte preparations. Human leukocyte IFN-alpha contains two major antigenically distinct subtypes, IFN-alpha 1 and IFN-alpha 2. However, swine leukocytes produced only a single predominant species of IFN-alpha with high antigenic homology to human IFN-alpha 2. Moreover, we were unable to detect close antigenic relatedness between recombinant porcine and human IFN-alpha 1 subtypes.