Abstract
Surveillance of highly pathogenic viruses circulating in both human and animal populations is crucial to unveil endemic infections and potential zoonotic reservoirs. Monitoring the burden of disease by serological assay could be used as an early warning system for imminent outbreaks as an increased seroprevalance often precedes larger outbreaks. However, the multitude of highly pathogenic viruses necessitates the need to identify specific antibodies against several targets from both humans as well as from potential reservoir animals such as bats. In order to address this, we have developed a broadly reactive multiplex microsphere immunoassay (MMIA) for the detection of antibodies against several highly pathogenic viruses from both humans and animals. To this aim, nucleoproteins (NP) of Ebola virus (EBOV), Marburg virus (MARV) and nucleocapsid proteins (NP) of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus, Rift Valley fever virus and Dobrava-Belgrade hantavirus were employed in a 5-plex assay for IgG detection. After optimisation, specific binding to each respective NP was shown by testing sera from humans and non-human primates with known infection status. The usefulness of our assay for serosurveillance was shown by determining the immune response against the NP antigens in a panel of 129 human serum samples collected in Guinea between 2011 and 2012 in comparison to a panel of 88 sera from the German blood bank. We found good agreement between our MMIA and commercial or in-house reference methods by ELISA or IIFT with statistically significant higher binding to both EBOV NP and MARV NP coupled microspheres in the Guinea panel. Finally, the MMIA was successfully adapted to detect antibodies from bats that had been inoculated with EBOV- and MARV- virus-like particles, highlighting the versatility of this technique and potentially enabling the monitoring of wildlife as well as human populations with this assay. We were thus able to develop and validate a sensitive and broadly reactive high-throughput serological assay which could be used as a screening tool to detect antibodies against several highly pathogenic viruses.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0008699 |
| Journal | PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 23 Oct 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information: This research was funded by the Robert Koch Institute, DFG grant KR 1293/9-1 (SW, PTW, sampling sera in Guinea) and also in part supported by the Intramural Research Program, NIAID, NIH, USA (AM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Open Access: This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Publisher Copyright: This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Citation: Surtees R, Stern D, Ahrens K, Kromarek N, Lander A, Kreher P, et al. (2020) Development of a multiplex microsphere immunoassay for the detection of antibodies against highly pathogenic viruses in human and animal serum samples.
PLoS Negl Trop Dis 14(10): e0008699.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0008699
