Quantification of Infectious Sendai Virus Using Plaque Assay

Abstract

Sendai virus (SeV) is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus of the family Paramyxoviridae. SeV is a useful tool to study its infectious pathomechanism in immunology and the pathomechanism of a murine model of IgA nephropathy. Virus quantification is essential not only to determine the original viral titers for an appropriate application, but also to measure the viral titers in samples from the harvests from experiments. There are mainly a couple of units/titers for Sendai viral quantification: plaque-forming units (PFU) and hemagglutination (HA) titer. Of these, we here describe a protocol for Sendai virus plaque assay to provide PFU using LLC-MK2 cells (a rhesus monkey kidney cell lines) and Guinea pig red blood cells. This traditional protocol enables us to determine Sendai virus PFU in viral stock as well as samples from your experiments.