Profiling Antibody Responses Against Yersinia Pestis By Protein Microarray

Background: Plague is one of the most deadly diseases caused by Y. pestis. Untill now, the pathogenic factors of it has not fully understand. Although there are many kinds of potential vaccines against plague, they all have their limitations. Additional potential protective antigens in combination with the hotly studies subunit vaccine candidates F1 and V antigens can be developed as multi-component subunit vaccines that have been widely considered as the choice of future vaccine development. The researches on antibody profiling in plague patients and immunized animals will give us a clue to find new elements for vaccine development. Protein Microarray is a high-throughput technique for analyzing the hundreds of antigen-antibody and protein-protein interaction simultaneously.Methods: A total of 202 genes that were predicted to encode outer membrane proteins, surface-exposed or secreted proteins were selected and expressed in vitro. After purification, a protein microarray representing 149 Y. pestis proteins was fabricated and used to determine the humoral immune responses to Yersinia pestis in plague patients naturally infected spermophilus undulates, challenged and immunized rabbits. Results: There are 15 kinds of proteins detected in all the antibody profiling analysises. The antibodies against these proteins, including YPMT1.84, YPMT1.24c, YPO3319, YPO2113, YPMT1.48c, YPCD1.31c, YPCD1.28, YPCD1.32c, YPCD1.26c, YPCD1.06c, YPO1435, YPO1303, YPO2118, YPO2090 and YPO2394 have the high fluorescence value and last long time. These proteins will be interest of future investigation. Besides these proteins, we have analyzed the difference among these antibody profiles and found a series of proteins that have antibody in only one of the profiles. These proteins may be involved in the pathogenic process of plague development in different animals.