Open AccessHighly Effective Serodiagnosis for Chagas' Disease
Author(s) -
Pilar Hernàndez,
Muriel Heimann,
Cristina Riera,
Marco Solano,
José Santalla,
Alejandro O. Luquetti,
Ewald Beck
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
clinical and vaccine immunology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.649
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1556-6811
pISSN - 1556-679X
DOI - 10.1128/cvi.00489-08
Subject(s) - trypanosoma cruzi , chagas disease , antigen , gene , amino acid , biology , linker , diagnostic test , computational biology , virology , parasite hosting , biochemistry , immunology , medicine , computer science , emergency medicine , world wide web , operating system
Many proteins ofTrypanosoma cruzi , the causative agent of Chagas' disease, contain characteristic arrays of highly repetitive immunogenic amino acid motifs. Diagnostic tests using these motifs in monomeric or dimeric form have proven to provide markedly improved specificity compared to conventional tests based on crude parasite extracts. However, in many cases the available tests still suffer from limited sensitivity. In this study we produced stable synthetic genes with maximal codon variability for the four diagnostic antigens, B13, CRA, TcD, and TcE, each containing between three and nine identical amino acid repeats. These genes were combined by linker sequences encoding short proline-rich peptides, giving rise to a 24-kDa fusion protein which was used as a novel diagnostic antigen in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay setup. Validation of the assay with a large number of well-characterized patient sera from Bolivia and Brazil revealed excellent diagnostic performance. The high sensitivity of the new test may allow future studies to use blood collected by finger prick and dried on filter paper, thus dramatically reducing the costs and effort for the detection ofT. cruzi infection.