Abstract
To improve animal production, a simple and accurate pregnancy diagnosis plays a very important role. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop an on-farm blood progesterone enzyme immunoassay (EIA) system for monitoring the early pregnancy in sows. Star tubes coated with mouse monoclonal anti-progesterone antibody were used for this proposed EIA system which was tested in field trials. The results could be obtained within 30 minutes either by spectrophotometry or the naked eye. Heparinized fresh blood samples collected from the ear vein of sows 17-22 days after breeding (day 0) were tested qualitatively to diagnose sows as pregnant or non-pregnant with high ( > 3 ng/ml) or low ($${{\leq_-}}3ng/ml$$) progesterone in the blood. To provided a double check data, plasma progesterone levels were also measured quantitatively by the same EIA system with some modification. Total agreement of diagnosis by the on-farm EIA kit and by farrowing or abortion from 128 tested sows was found to be 92.2% accuracy (93.1% on pregnant diagnosis and 83.3% on non-pregnant diagnosis). It was concluded that the on-farm EIA blood progesterone test is a very useful method for monitoring the early pregnancy status of sows.