Objective To establish an indirect ELISA method for detection of measles virus antibody based on the nucleoprotein of measles virus expressed in prokaryotic system selected as the coating antigen.Methods The working conditions were screened and optimized to determine the operation process of indirect ELISA.The anti-measles virus IgG antibody in 157 sera of healthy children and mothers of newborn infants was detected and compared with the commercial measles virus ELISA IgG antibody detection kit.Results The result showed that the coefficient of variation of intra and inter assay repeatability of the indirect ELISA was less than 10％.Compared with the result of the commercial kit,the total concordance rate of serum samples was 95.5％,and the sensitivity and specificity were 94.8％ and 98.3％,respectively.There was no significant difference between the two methods (x2 =0.313,P＞0.05;x2 =0.000,P＞ 0.05) in the positive rate of measles virus IgG antibody in 85 healthy children at the age of 0～ 15 years.The level of measles virus antibody detected by ELISA established in this study showed the same increasing and decreasing trend as that detected by the commercial kit in different age groups.The correlation coefficient r of the quantitative result was 0.893 (P＜ 0.001),which showed the quantitative potential of the method.Conclusions The ELISA method established in this study has good stability,high sensitivity and specificity,and there was no significant difference between the detection results of commercial kit and the ELISA method.It can be used for the seroepidemiological investigation of measles virus and the evaluation of antibody level of the population after vaccination.