I am trying to come up with a better alternative to injecting a drop of your blood into a chicken's muscles, because as I pointed out earlier, one drop of ME/CFS patient's blood will probably contain just 5 or 10 viral particles, and that is most likely not going to be enough to stimulate the chicken's immune system to generate an antibody response, unless those 10 viral particles instigate an infection in the chicken — but that may not happen, because I am not really sure if the enteroviruses associated with ME/CFS (coxsackievirus B and echovirus) can infect chickens.
If we compare this situation to a vaccine, which is designed to create an antibody response: a viral vaccine will typically inject around 1 million deactivated viral particles, along with an adjuvant like aluminum hydroxide to stimulate the immune response to those viral particles. The virus is deactivated (with heat or formaldehyde), so cannot create an infection. But those 1 million deactivated viral particles appear to be enough to generate an antibody response. So I think we would need to aim to inject a similar amount of enteroviral particles into the chicken's muscle, otherwise you may not get any immune response.
It's different if you are injecting bacteria, because I should think that most bacteria will be able to instigate an infection in the chicken, which will then generate an antibody response. But with viruses, to instigate an infection, the virus has to be compatible with the cells in the host (the chicken).
So if we cannot instigate a viral infection in the chicken, I believe we would need to inject a large quantity of viral particles, like 1 million viral particles, in order to stimulate an antibody response.
But there is a hitch: for this to work, even if the ME/CFS-associated enteroviruses do not form a productive infection in the chicken, there would still need to be some degree of compatibility of these enteroviruses with the host's cells (the chicken's cells).
In particular, I believe it would be necessary for these enteroviruses injected into the chicken to undergo the process of
viral attachment and
viral entry into the host's cells (even if once they get into the cell, they cannot form a productive infection, due to incompatibility).
If the ME/CFS patient's enteroviruses injected into the chicken do not enter the chicken's cells by the process of viral attachment and viral entry, then as far as I can see, no antibodies will be formed.
This is because when viral particles enter the cell, they are chopped up into small proteins by enzymes in the cell, and these small viral proteins are then externally displayed to the immune system, via the cell's
major histocompatibility complex II (MHC II), which is like an antenna on the outside surface of the cell.
The purpose of MHC II is to display and "advertise" the component proteins of a pathogen infecting a cell to the immune system, so that the immune system can create antibodies that target those proteins.
So if the enteroviruses injected into the chicken are not capable of entering into the chicken's cells, then they will not be chopped up and externally displayed on the MHC II, and thus no antibodies that target those enterovirus proteins will be created by the chicken's immune system. At least that's my understanding of how antibodies are generated.
Thus for this work for viruses, I think it all hinges on whether the virus can enter the chicken's cells.
Coxsackievirus B for example uses cellular receptors such as the coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor (CAR) to enter cells.
Chicken cells do posses CAR, but unfortunately in
this study on coxsackievirus B infection it says that:
Chicken CAR did not mediate virus entry in vivo, so that hearts expressing chicken instead of mouse CAR were protected from infection and myocarditis.
So whereas mice are often used to study coxsackievirus B infection of the heart muscles (myocarditis), it seems that chicken muscle cells do not allow coxsackievirus B to enter them.
(Although it's not quite that straightforward, because in the study they did not use chickens, but transgenic mice expressing chicken CAR.)
Thus this is a bit of snag for our purposes.
Coxsackievirus B also infects epithelial cells (the cells the line the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts), but I could not find any info regarding whether coxsackievirus B can enter chicken epithelial cells.
