We have used a panel of polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies against gp120 and gp 160, the envelope glycoproteins of human immunodeficiency virus type 1, to create rapid, simple, and sensitive twin-site sandwich ELISA specific for gp120 and gp160 or for gp160 alone. These assays can detect 500 COS cells in a population transiently transfected with a construct encoding gp120 and gp160, or 50 pg of recombinant gp160. We estimate that the mean amount of gp120 + gp160 in the transfected population is equivalent to 2.5 × 10 6 molecules per cell, 40-50% of which can be recovered from the culture medium as gp120 after 24 hours. The ELISA can be adapted to assess whether gp120 is detectable in the sera of HIV-1-infected persons: we show that gp120/gp160 is completely stable in normal human serum for at least 24 hours at 37°C.
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Moore et al. (1988) studied this question.