Elhosseiny Noha M, Samir Tamer M, Ali Aliaa A, El-Kholy Amani A, Attia Ahmed S
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University, Cairo 11562, Egypt.
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, College of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Manufacturing, Misr University for Science and Technology, Cairo 12573, Egypt.
Pharmaceutics. 2021 Jul 26;13(8):1141. doi: 10.3390/pharmaceutics13081141.
Neonatal sepsis is a leading cause of death among newborns and infants, especially in the developing world. The problem is compounded by the delays in pinpointing the causative agent of the infection. This is reflected in increasing mortality associated with these cases and the spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. In this work, we deployed bioinformatics and proteomics analyses to determine a promising target that could be used for the identification of a major neonatal sepsis causative agent, . A 19 amino acid peptide from a hypothetical outer membrane was found to be very specific to the species, well conserved among its strains, surface exposed, and expressed in conditions simulating infection. Antibodies against the selected peptide were conjugated to gold nanoparticles and incorporated into an immunochromatographic strip. The developed strip was able to detect as low as 10 CFU/mL of . Regarding specificity, it showed negative results with both and . More importantly, in a pilot study using neonatal sepsis cases blood specimens, the developed strip selectively gave positive results within 20 min with those infected with without prior sample processing. However, it gave negative results in cases infected with other bacterial species.
新生儿败血症是新生儿和婴儿死亡的主要原因，尤其是在发展中世界。感染病原体诊断的延迟使问题更加复杂。这反映在与这些病例相关的死亡率增加以及多重耐药细菌的传播上。在这项工作中，我们采用生物信息学和蛋白质组学分析来确定一个有前景的靶点，该靶点可用于鉴定主要的新生儿败血症病原体。从一种假定的外膜中发现的一种19个氨基酸的肽对该物种具有高度特异性，在其菌株中高度保守，暴露于表面，并在模拟感染的条件下表达。针对所选肽的抗体与金纳米颗粒偶联，并整合到免疫层析条中。所开发的试纸条能够检测低至10 CFU/mL的[具体病原体名称未给出]。在特异性方面，它对[另外两种病原体名称未给出]均呈阴性结果。更重要的是，在一项使用新生儿败血症病例血液标本的初步研究中，所开发的试纸条在未经预先样本处理的情况下，能够在20分钟内对感染[具体病原体名称未给出]的样本选择性地给出阳性结果。然而，在感染其他细菌物种的病例中它给出阴性结果。
