Design, construction and evaluation of multi-epitope antigens for diagnosis of Lyme disease

Introduction Introduction and objective. Lyme disease (LD) is the most common vector-borne disease in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere. Diagnosis of LD is mainly based on clinical symptoms supported with serology (detection of anti- Borrelia antibodies) and is often misdiagnosed in areas of endemicity. Material and methods In this study, the chimeric proteins (A/C-2, A/C-4 and A/C-7.1) consisting of B-cell epitopes of outer surface proteins OspA and OspC from Borrelia genospecies prevalent in Eastern Slovakia, were designed, over-expressed in E. coli, and used to detect specific anti- Borrelia antibodies in serologically characterized sera from patients with Lyme-like symptoms to evaluate their diagnostic potential. Results Results showed that chimeras vary in their immuno-reactivity when tested with human sera. Compared with the results obtained from a two-tier test, the application of recombinant multi-epitope chimeric proteins as diagnosis antigens, produced fair agreement in the case of A/C-2 (0.20<κ<0.40) and good agreement (0.60<κ<0.80) when A/C-7.1 was used as capture antigen. Chimera A/C-4 were excluded from further study due to loss of reactivity with OspA-specific antibodies. Conclusions The combination of specific B-cell epitopes from OspA and OspC proteins may improve the diagnostic accuracy of serologic assays, but further studies are required to address this hypothesis.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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