Question

Medical testing: enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test for presence of antigen or antibody

EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL

In this laboratory, you will test seven different patients using a direct ELISA. We have access to serum samples from the main characters of the TV show The Big Bang Theory. You will test each of them for the presence of ZIKA virus and HIV, as well as perform a pregnancy test, using known antigens/antibodies for those diseases/test. Students will work in pairs. Serum for each character of the Big Bang Theory has been incubated overnight at 4°C in the wells of an ELISA plate. You are taking it from here.

1.) What basic principles of antibody-mediated immunity are utilized in an ELISA assay?

2.) What might have caused some positive results to be lighter in color than others?

3.) Why can some viruses not be targeted by antibodies for destruction? Is this a limitation for developing an ELISA-based protocol for detecting the disease?

4.) Postulate a hypothesis on how the characters infected with Zika contracted the disease (in time and space); consider that two of them live in the same apartment and the others visit them frequently.

SYMBIOTS LAB different from above ^

1. If you give a high temperature and high light treatment to Symbiodinium linchaea and Symbiodinium minutum, what results do you expect after 3 weeks of treatment?

Answer 1

1) Scientists have designed ELISA assay based on the principles of antibody-mediated immunity, that is antibodies are produced in response to pathogens and attach to the antigen on pathogens forming an antigen-antibody complex.

2) Lighter color indicates that the serum of that patient contains fewer antibodies that serum of the patients with darker colored results. This could occur because of two reasons: first, the infection is quite recent and the patients' body hasn't produced many antibodies yet, or second, the infection has occurred a long time ago and the number of antibodies has declined.

3) The virus is the smart player. To avoid recognition by the immune system, it invades the host cell and uses its machinery to replicate. Once it's inside the cell, the immune system, aka, antibodies cannot recognize them. So it is hard to target virus with antibodies.

4) Hypothesis: One of the characters that live in the apartment was bitten by an infected Aedes Mosquito while he was out for work. He was the carrier of the disease now. when back in the apartment he was bitten by an uninfected Aedes mosquito which after bitting became infected. now the recently infected Aedes mosquito bites the other characters ( living in the apartment and those regularly visiting them). :P

it can also pass through sexual intercourse.