The theory and practice of the viral dose in neutralization assay: Insights on SARS-CoV-2 “doublethink” effect

The neutralization assays are considered the gold-standard being capable of evaluating and detecting, functional antibodies. To date, many different protocols exist for micro-neutralization (MN) assay which varies in several steps: cell number and seeding conditions, virus amount used in the infection step, virus-serum-cells incubation time and read out. The aim of the present preliminary study was to carry out SARS-CoV-2 wild type MN assay in order to investigate which optimal tissue culture infective dose 50 (TCID(50)) infective dose in use is the most adequate choice for implementation in terms of reproducibility, standardization possibilities and comparability of results. Therefore, we assessed the MN by using two viral infective doses: the “standard” dose of 100 TCID(50)/well and a reduced dose of 25 TCID(50)/well. The results obtained, yielded by MN on using the lower infective dose (25 TCID50), were higher respect to those obtained with the standard infective dose. This suggests that the lower dose can potentially have a positive impact on the detection and estimation of real amount of neutralizing antibodies present in a given sample, showing higher sensitivity maintaining high specificity.