Abstract
Legionnaires’ disease is diagnosed predominantly by urinary antigen detection, and patient isolates are rarely available. The lipopolysaccharide (LPS) epitope pattern of isolates detected by monoclonal antibodies is an accepted marker for the phenotyping of L. pneumophila serogroup 1 strains into monoclonal subgroups. L. pneumophila LPS is the dominant antigen in patients’ urinary specimens. By using commercially available microtiter wells coated with rabbit anti-Legionella serogroup 1 IgG as the catching antibody, LPS components in urine specimens were bound and detected separately by corresponding monoclonal antibodies of the Dresden Panel. The subtyping of LPS on urinary antigen molecules by using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) allows deducing of first evidences for the identity/non-identity of environmental isolates and the legionellosis pathogen. Most importantly in our study, urinary antigen typing possesses high probability to distinguish (or does not distinguish) if the pathogen belongs to the MAb 3/1-negative L. pneumophila strains, which are widespread contaminants of water systems, but represent the minority of patient isolates.
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Acknowledgment
We are grateful to Dr. T. G. Harrison (London, UK), Dr. S. A. Uldum (Copenhagen), and Prof. Dr. G. Wewalka (Vienna, Austria) for making available some urine specimens from culture-proven legionellosis patients. For the excellent technical assistance, we gratefully thank Sigrid Gäbler, Kerstin Lück, and Ines Wolf. This study was partly supported by the Robert Koch-Institute/German Federal Ministry of Health (grant 1369–351).
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Helbig, J.H., Jacobs, E. & Lück, C. Legionella pneumophila urinary antigen subtyping using monoclonal antibodies as a tool for epidemiological investigations. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis 31, 1673–1677 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-011-1492-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-011-1492-7