Abstract
While the Lancefield whole blood killing assay is named after the renowned streptococcal researcher Rebecca Lancefield, the protocol was first described by Todd in 1927 (Br J Exp Pathol 8:1–5, 1927). Initially, the assay was used to identify novel Group A Streptococcal (GAS) serotypes through the supplementation of non-immune human blood (often from infants) with type-specific antisera prepared in rabbits (Lancefield, J Exp Med 106:525–544, 1957; Maxted, Br J Exp Pathol 37:415–422, 1956) and to demonstrate the impressive longevity of type-specific immunity in patients following invasive GAS infection (Lancefield, J Exp Med 110:271–292, 1959). The modern assay is routinely used to screen defined GAS mutants (Wessels, Bronze, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 91:12238–12242, 1994; Zinkernagel et al., Cell Host Microbe 4:170–178, 2008) or transposon libraries (Le Breton et al., Infect Immun 81:862-875, 2013) for enhanced susceptibility to opsonophagocytic killing or to screen vaccine antisera (Salehi et al., mSphere 3:e00617–e00618, 2018) or other serological preparations (Reglinski et al., Sci Rep 5:15825, 2015) for anti-streptococcal activity.
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References
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Reglinski, M. (2020). Lancefield Whole Blood Killing Assay to Evaluate Vaccine Efficacy. In: Proft, T., Loh, J. (eds) Group A Streptococcus. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2136. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0467-0_25
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