Your Viral Past: A Comprehensive Method for Serological Profiling to Explore the Human Virome

[摘要] This is an exciting time of rapid advancement in the field of infectious diseases diagnostics. Traditional methods to diagnose infections have typically been slow and relied on culture for detection of infectious agents. In recent years, however, there has been an explosion in new methodologies and instrumentation to diagnose infections, with a focus on optimization of therapy and antimicrobial stewardship. Newer assays have improved diagnostic testing in several ways, including reductions in turnaround time and improvements in analytical sensitivity and specificity. A major theme in testing for infectious diseases has been multiplexing of diagnostic tests, to allow simultaneous testing for several different pathogens within a single assay. The use of multiplex molecular assays, such as multiplex PCR, is now well established, and tests have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for 20 or more pathogens and genetic markers of antibiotic resistance from a single specimen.Although multiplex tests are increasingly common for detecting pathogens, they are much less common for detecting antibodies specific for pathogens. Although antibody responses against pathogens take a week or more to develop after initial infection, they are often long lived, so detecting these responses has the potential to indicate present, recent, or long-past infections. Most immunoassays detect antibodies against a single pathogen. These may be clinically useful, but clinical judgment must be used in the selection of assays, and the cause of an infection may not be detected if the appropriate antibody is not sought. Moreover, it would be cumbersome to use conventional immunoassays to try to determine the cumulative viral infections that a person has encountered over a lifetime.Our improved understanding of the many microorganisms that infect and colonize our bodies has led to a specific interest in the cumulative history of viral infections in humans. This has grown out …

[学科分类] 过敏症与临床免疫学