Profiling the humoral immune response to infection by using proteome microarrays: high-throughput vaccine and diagnostic antigen discovery.

Despite the increasing availability of genome sequences from many human pathogens, the production of complete proteomes remains at a bottleneck. To address this need, a high-throughput PCR recombination cloning and expression platform has been developed that allows hundreds of genes to be batch-processed by using ordinary laboratory procedures without robotics. The method relies on high-throughput amplification of each predicted ORF by using gene specific primers, followed by in vivo homologous recombination into a T7 expression vector. The proteins are expressed in an Escherichia coli-based cell-free in vitro transcription/translation system, and the crude reactions containing expressed proteins are printed directly onto nitrocellulose microarrays without purification. The protein microarrays are useful for determining the complete antigen-specific humoral immune-response profile from vaccinated or infected humans and animals. The system was verified by cloning, expressing, and printing a vaccinia virus proteome consisting of 185 individual viral proteins. The chips were used to determine Ab profiles in serum from vaccinia virus-immunized humans, primates, and mice. Human serum has high titers of anti-E. coli Abs that require blocking to unmask vaccinia-specific responses. Naive humans exhibit reactivity against a subset of 13 antigens that were not associated with vaccinia immunization. Naive mice and primates lacked this background reactivity. The specific profiles between the three species differed, although a common subset of antigens was reactive after vaccinia immunization. These results verify this platform as a rapid way to comprehensively scan humoral immunity from vaccinated or infected humans and animals.