BACKGROUND Acute pulmonary histoplasmosis can be severe, especially following heavy inoculum exposure. Rapid diagnosis is critical and often possible by detection of antigen, but this test may be falsely negative in 17% of such cases. Antibody detection by enzyme immunoassay (EIA) may increase sensitivity and permit the measurement of immunoglobulin M (IgM) and immunoglobulin G (IgG) classes of...

BACKGROUND Anti-filarial IgG4 antibody has been shown to be a good marker for detection of lymphatic filaria infection. Previous studies demonstrated that anti-filarial IgG4 assay using BmR1 recombinant antigen was highly specific and sensitive for detection of brugian filariasis. For bancroftian filariasis, an equivalent assay employing recombinant antigen expressed from the ORF of SXP1 gene h...

background: we aimed to value the usefulness of free to total prostate-specific antigen and prostate-specific antigen (psa) density for prostate cancer in the patients with psa levels of 4.0 ng/ml or less. methods: a total of 343 subjects with psa levels of 4.0 ng/ml or less were biopsied. all patients were divided into four groups according to the psa levels: 0 to 1.0 ng/ml, 1.1 to 2.0 ng/ml, ...

background: we have previously reported that a 31 kda protein was screened from the excretory-secretory (es) proteins of tichinella spiralis muscle larvae (ml) by immunoproteomics using early infection sera, and the gene encoding a 31 kda protein from t. spiralis was cloned and expressed in an e. coli expression system. in this study, the recombinant 31 kda antigens were used for detection of a...

A new modular automated enzyme immunoassay (EIA) (Enzymun-Test HIV Ag: Boehringer Mannheim) for quantitative human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antigen detection was evaluated by testing a panel of 1,506 serum samples, including seroconversions, dilution series, follow-up samples from patients under antiretroviral therapy, single serum specimens from HIV-seropositive individuals in different st...

BACKGROUND Lymphatic filariasis is a neglected tropical disease leading to profound disfiguring causing socio economic burden in the tropics. Current diagnosis strategies available during field surveys and epidemics are based on traditional microscopic detections and a few antigen/antibody assays. We have compared different sampling methodologies and standardized the highly sensitive and reliab...

Background: Although a simple and direct method does not exist for the detection of chlamydial infections, there are situations in which reliable serological tests, with sensi-tivity related to a specific antigen, could be helpful. Objective: The aim of this study was to clone the first 1100 bp of the C. trachomatis outer membrane protein 2 (omp2) gene in order to prepare a recombinant protein ...

Background & Aims: Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate, intracellular parasite, which is widely spread in the world. The parasite is able to infect all warm-blooded hosts including humans and farm animals. The infection in humans often occurs after the ingestion of raw or undercooked meat containing tissue cysts. Several methods have been applied to detect this parasite in contaminated foods. Reco...