Quantitation of Bacillus anthracis by using of soybean agglutinin conjugates.

We examine the possibility of using the soybean agglutinin (SBA) marked by peroxidase (HRP), biotin, FITC, or gold in order to determine the number of Bacillus anthracis cells of vaccine strain STI. It was shown that the technique based on interaction between the lectin and microbial cell walls likely are not inferior in sensitivity to traditional ELISA variants. The sensitivities of methods were 10(4) cells/ml in the case of SBA-biotin, 10(5) cells/ml in the case of SBA-HRP, or 10(6) cells/ml in the cases of SBA-gold and SBA-FITC.