The recombinant fusion protein holds both the AP enzymatic activity and the SAG1 immunoreactivity.

This result strongly indicates that the recombinant SAG1–AP conjugate is fully bi-functional. Immunoreactivity of the recombinant SAG1–AP conjugate with a collection of human sera samples, from T. gondii sero-positive and sero-negative patients, was performed by direct-ELISA and dot-blot assays. In the ELISA experiment, the results showed that the investigated SAG1–AP immunoconjugate was able to directly detect specific anti-T. gondii antibodies Pexidartinib using the soluble chromogenic pNPP substrate and discriminate between negative and positive samples according to the standard gold test results ( Fig. 5A). Low background NVP-BEZ235 manufacturer values were obtained for all sera (data not shown) and deducted from final values. As seen in the ELISA analysis, the dot-blot assay

confirmed the SAG1–AP immunodetection of specific T. gondii antibodies ( Fig. 5B). Positive samples were clearly detected by visual inspection when the assays were performed with sera samples having O.D values over 0.5 by the SAG1–AP direct-ELISA. Under this value, the dot-blot was considered as doubtful and discarded (data not shown). No significant background staining was observed. For both immunoassays, the total one-step reaction procedure takes no more than 2 h to detect specific antibody responses against T. gondii. In this study, for the first time, utility of the full length recombinant SAG1 antigen genetically fused to bacterial alkaline phosphatase in the serodiagnosis of human toxoplasmosis was examined. Therefore, we first described, the successful production of the

chimerical protein based on alkaline phosphatase-fused to the T. gondii surface antigen 1 in the periplasmic space. Then, biological activities of the two proteic partners were reported separately. Finally, the value of the SAG1–AP fusion protein as a novel in vitro tool to detect specific antibody responses against T. gondii in a one-step procedure was established. Although SAG1 was the most widely explored antigen and has been shown to be a good candidate for Toxoplasma diagnosis, PAK6 its expression is very difficult to achieve in E. coli systems as it contains a proportionally high number of cysteines (12 residues) assembling six intramolecular disulfide bonds that give rise to immunologically relevant conformational epitopes ( Cesbron-Delauw et al., 1994). It has been reported that full-sized recombinant SAG1 was essentially expressed in E. coli as insoluble inclusion bodies form, requiring a time consuming and expert process to recover activity through in vitro refolding steps, to finally result in low binding to immune sera ( Aubert et al., 2000 and Chen et al., 2001). Similarly, using a truncated form of SAG1 may decrease the immunoreactivity of the recombinant antigen and may be poorly recognized by the antiserum against native SAG1.