Introduction: The Hawaii virus (HV) and Mexican virus (MX) belong to distinct genetic clades in the Snow Mountain virus (SMV)-like human caliciviruses (HuCVs), which are distinct from the Norwalk virus (NV) in the NV-like HuCVs. Prior studies showed that baculovirus-expressed recombinant NV(rNV) capsids are antigenically distinct from recombinant MX (rMX) capsids. Methods: A baculovirus-expressed recombinant HV (rHV) capsid was compared with the rNV and rMX capsids in detection of antibodies in patients involved in three outbreaks of gastroenteritis associated with SMV-like HuCVs. Results: The rHV capsid detected seroresponses in 12/13 (92%), 6/9 (67%) and 3/10(30%), the rMX capsid detected 13/13 (100%), 7/9 (78%), 6/10 (60%), and the rNV detected 4/13 (31%), 0/9 (0%), and 1/10 (10%) of patients in the three outbreaks respectively. Patients who had high convalescent antibody titers against rHV also were more likely to have high convalescent antibody titers to rMX. Higher geometric mean titers of convalescent antibodies and higher mean fold increases of antibody response correlated with closer genetic identity of the outbreak strains to the HV, MX or NV prototypes. Conclusions: HV and MX are antigenic related but distinguishable antigenic types. Future development of type-specific assays is required to identify type-specific epitopes on HuCVs.

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