Immunodiagnosis

Question 1

what are serological applications?

Answer 1

the use of antibodies or antigens as reagents where antibodies are used to detect antigens and antigens are used to detect antibodies

Question 2

what are agglutination tests?

Answer 2

• agglutination is clumping of particulate antigens (e.g., cells, bacteria, or latex beads) when they react with specific antibodies

Question 3

what is indirect or passive agglutination?

Answer 3

coating antigen on the surface of a carrier molecule - used to detect antibodies - when the antibody binds to the coated antigen, agglutination takes place on the surface of the carrier.

Question 4

what is reverse passive agglutination?

Answer 4

antibody is coated on a carrier molecule that detects antigen in the patient’s serum.

Question 5

what is a Hemagglutination Assay?

Answer 5

Used to detect the presence of certain viruses or measure their concentration.

Question 6

what is an example of an Agglutination test?

Answer 6

test for rheumatoid factor

Question 7

what are limitations of agglutination tests?

Answer 7

• positive result does not necessarily mean the patient is sick ( they may have had the disease and recovered)
• false negatives: poor producers of antibodies
• false positives: a positive result may occur if an unrelated antibody reacts with the antigen non-specifically

Question 8

what are precipitation tests?

Answer 8

• precipitation tests occurs when soluble antigens react with specific antibodies to form visible, insoluble complexes (precipitates)

Question 9

how are quantitative precipitation curves derived?

Answer 9

experiments where increasing amounts of antigen are added to a fixed amount of antibody

Question 10

what are immunodiffusion tests commonly used for?

Answer 10

identifying antigenic relationships

Question 11

what are monoclonal antibodies?

Answer 11

highly specific and identical antibodies produced by a single clone of immune cells.

Question 12

what is immunohistochemistry?

Answer 12

combines antibody specificity with histological analysis to detect and localize proteins within tissue samples by conjugating antibodies with a fluorescent tag

Question 13

what is flow cytometry (fluorescence activated cell sort FACS)?

Answer 13

• laser equipment that detects fluorescence on individual cells one by one
• multicolor staining to detect more than one antigen simultaneously

Question 14

what is enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) ?

Answer 14

used in many laboratories to determine whether a particular antibody is present in a patient’s blood sample.

Question 15

what is radioimmunoassay?

Answer 15

technique used to measure the concentration of antigens in a sample by using radioactive isotopes

Question 16

what is the complement fixation assay?

Answer 16

detects the presence of either a specific antibody or antigen in a patient’s serum. It was widely used to diagnose infections