What is it about?
Conventionally, antibody activity in blood is measured by diluting serum as much as possible while antibody activity is still measurable, a process called titration. We combined serum titration with the titration of targets of antibodies, called antigen. We generated density series of antigen microspots on protein chips and identified a mathematical formula for calculating the activity of antibodies from these measurements. The results obtained have universal units, unlike current serological assays with arbitrary units.
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Why is it important?
In spite of the standardization and automation efforts, which made serology more reproducible, we have no universal units for serum antibody reactivity. The titers and arbitrary units in use today are generated with a single diagnostic decision in mind but therefore represent a barrier from making serology a systems level approach to immunity. By applying state-of-the-art protein chips and refined mathematical analysis, we think immunochemistry can be turned into immunochemical thermodynamics, yielding universal units of measurement.
Perspectives
I think the development of truly quantitative assays would represent a very important step towards quantitative systems immunology. The omics era brought about the accumulation of immense amount of data and information in immunology, but in addition to approaches the search for patterns in those data we need to understand physical laws that generate the patterns. This is our first paper on the development of quantitative serology using protein arrays, which will hopefully be followed by a couple of others.
József Prechl
Diagnosticum
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Absolute Quantitation of Serum Antibody Reactivity Using the Richards Growth Model for Antigen Microspot Titration, Sensors, May 2022, MDPI AG,
DOI: 10.3390/s22103962.
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