Virus Yield Reduction Assay
Currently, various techniques are used to evaluate the antiviral activity of compounds against viruses. Some of the more commonly used procedures include plaque reduction, dye uptake, nucleic acid hybridization, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. A less commonly used technique is the virus yield reduction assay. In this procedure, the virus-infected culture is incubated with antiviral compounds for a period of time to allow the virus to replicate, and then a separate monolayer culture is used to titrate the new progeny viruses. Although virus yield reduction assay can quantitatively measure the production of infectious virus particles in drug-treated cultures, the labor-intensive nature of this assay has so far prevented its widespread use as a conventional technique. To simplify this test, we modified it to use microtitration technology.