Title
An improved enzyme-linked immunoassay for the detection of leptospira-specific antibodies
Date Issued
01 January 2018
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Chen H.W.
Lukas H.
Becker K.
Weissenberger G.
Halsey E.S.
Guevara C.
Hall E.
Maves R.C.
Tilley D.H.
Kuo L.
Kochel T.J.
Ching W.M.
Naval Medical Research Center
Abstract
Leptospirosis is a neglected zoonotic disease with worldwide endemicity and continues to be a significant public health burden on resource-limited populations. Previously, we produced three highly purified recombinant antigens (rLipL32, rLipL41, and rLigA-Rep) and evaluated their performance of detecting Leptospira-specific antibodies in enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) as compared with the microscopic agglutination test (MAT). The overall sensitivity of this assay approached 90%. Recently, another recombinant antigen (rLigB-Rep) was prepared. We tested each individual antigen and a 1:1:1:1 mixture of these four antigens for the detection of Leptospira-specific antibodies in ELISA. The performance of these recombinant antigens was evaluated with a much larger febrile patient panel (337 MAT-confirmed positive sera and 92 MAT-negative sera from febrile patients). Combining the detection results of immunoglobulin M and immunoglobulin G from these four individual antigens, the overall sensitivity was close to 90% but the specificity was only 66%, based on the MAT reference method. The overall sensitivity and specificity of the four-antigen mixture were 82% and 86%, respectively. The mixture of four antigens also exhibited a broader reactivity with MAT-positive samples of 18 serovars from six major pathogenic Leptospira species. Given the limitations of MAT, the data were further analyzed by Bayesian latent class model, showing that ELISA using a 1:1:1:1 mixture still maintained high sensitivity (79%) and specificity (88%) as compared with the sensitivity (90%) and specificity (83%) of MAT. Therefore, ELISA using a mixture of these four antigens could be a very useful test for seroprevalence studies.
Start page
266
End page
274
Volume
99
Issue
2
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Inmunología Biología celular, Microbiología
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85051060152
PubMed ID
Source
American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
ISSN of the container
00029637
Sponsor(s)
Funding text 1 This research was supported by Naval Medical Research Center, research work unit 6000.RAD1.J.A0310 and the United States Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Systems Research Program, work unit number 847705.82000.25GB. B0016. Funding text 2 Financial support: This research was supported by Naval Medical Research Center, research work unit 6000.RAD1.J.A0310 and the United States Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Systems Research Program, work unit number 847705.82000.25GB. B0016.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus