Department of Parasitology, Vaccine Research and Development Laboratory, Ege University Faculty of Medicine, Bornova/İzmir, Turkey.
Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA.
Parasit Vectors. 2018 Jul 4;11(1):393. doi: 10.1186/s13071-018-2934-1.
Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular protozoan parasite that causes congenital toxoplasmosis, as well as other serious clinical presentations in immune compromised humans. The parasite has also been recently linked to behavioral diseases in humans and other mammalian hosts. New antigens are being evaluated to develop a diagnostic kit for the diagnosis of acute infection or a protective vaccine.
In this study, we have focused on the discovery of new antigenic proteins from T. gondii genomic data using a high throughput protein microarray screening. To date, microarrays containing > 2870 candidate exon products of T. gondii have been probed with sera collected from patients with toxoplasmosis. Here, the protein microarrays are probed with well-characterized serum samples from animal models administered orally with oocysts or tissue cysts. The aim was to discover the antigens that overlap in the mouse profile with human antibody profiles published previously. For this, a reactive antigen list of 240 antigens recognized by murine IgG and IgM was identified using pooled sera from orally infected mice.
Analyses of screening data have identified plenty of antigens and showed strong immunogenicity in both mouse and human antibody profiles. Among them, ROP1, GRA2, GRA3, GRA4, GRA5, GRA6, GRA7, GRA8, GRA14, MIC1, MIC2 and MAG1 have shown strong immunogenicity and used as antigen in development of vaccines or serological diagnostic assays in previous studies.
In addition to the above findings, ROP6, MIC12, SRS29A and SRS13 have shown strong immunogenicity but have not been tested in development of a diagnostic assay or a vaccine model yet.
刚地弓形虫是一种专性细胞内原生动物寄生虫，可导致先天性弓形虫病，以及免疫功能低下的人类出现其他严重临床表现。最近，该寄生虫还与人类和其他哺乳动物宿主的行为疾病有关。目前正在评估新抗原，以开发用于诊断急性感染或保护性疫苗的诊断试剂盒。
在这项研究中，我们使用高通量蛋白质微阵列筛选技术，专注于从刚地弓形虫基因组数据中发现新的抗原蛋白。迄今为止，已经用来自弓形虫病患者的血清探测了包含 > 2870 个候选外显子产物的微阵列。在这里，用已口服感染卵囊或组织包囊的动物模型的特征明确的血清样本探测蛋白质微阵列。目的是发现与先前发表的人类抗体图谱重叠的在鼠图谱中发现的抗原。为此，使用口服感染小鼠的混合血清，确定了 240 种被鼠 IgG 和 IgM 识别的反应性抗原列表。
筛选数据的分析鉴定了大量抗原，并在鼠和人抗体图谱中均显示出很强的免疫原性。其中，ROP1、GRA2、GRA3、GRA4、GRA5、GRA6、GRA7、GRA8、GRA14、MIC1、MIC2 和 MAG1 已显示出很强的免疫原性，并在以前的研究中被用作疫苗或血清学诊断检测的抗原。
除上述发现外，ROP6、MIC12、SRS29A 和 SRS13 也表现出很强的免疫原性，但尚未在诊断检测或疫苗模型的开发中进行测试。
