Latex Agglutination Test for Detecting Acute Toxoplasmosis

PERETTI, L. E.; GONZALEZ, V. D. G.; COSTA, J.G.; MARCIPAR, I. S.; GUGLIOTTA, L. M.

Porto do Galinhas, PE, Brazil

Simposio; XIV Latin American Symposium on Polymers (SLAP 2014)/ and XII Ibero American Congress on Polymers; 2014

Asociación Brasileña de Polímeros

The acute phase recombinant protein of Toxoplasma gondii P35Ag was expressed and purified; and the homogenate of the parasite was obtained from infected mouse. These antigens were used to produce latex-protein complexes (LPC) through physical adsorption (PA) and chemical coupling (CC) at pH 6 onto latex particles of different sizes and charge densities, with the aim of producing immunoagglutination reagents able to detect Toxoplasmosis recently acquired. On sensitization experiments, greater amount of bound protein was obtained with P35Ag than with the homogenate; and this could be because it is a complex mixture, which includes a large number of proteins of different molar mass, isoelectric points and hydrophobicity. After the LPC characterization, they were employed in immunoagglutination (IA) assays. The agglutination reaction was followed by measuring the changes in the optical absorbance by turbidimetry. Experiments against a serum panel indicates that the IA test based on the latex-P35Ag complex could be used as a screening method for detecting acute Toxoplasmosis.