Serum antibody responses to 10 Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins, purified protein derivative, and old tuberculin in natural and experimental tuberculosis in rhesus monkeys.

Old tuberculin (OT) and purified protein derivative (PPD) are widely used for tuberculin skin testing (TST) in diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) but often yield poor specificity and anergy in reaction. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new serological methods as a possible auxiliary diagnostic method for TB. In this study, we characterized the dynamic antibody responses of 10 purified recombinant antigens, PPD, and OT in rhesus monkeys experimentally infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis and analyzed the time to antibody detection, antibody levels, and their association with the infectious doses. The antibodies were detected as early as 4 weeks after infection in response to 5 antigens (CFP10, CFP10-ESAT-6, U1, MPT64, and Ag85b). Antibodies against most of the other antigens were detected between 4 and 12 weeks after infection. The levels of antibodies were dose dependant. We further evaluated the serodiagnostic potential of these antigens by using indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in 71 TST-positive and 90 TST-negative serum samples from monkeys. For all 12 antigens, the median optical density values of TST-positive monkeys were statistically significantly higher than those of TST-negative monkeys (P < 0.001). Among those antigens, Ag85b and CFP10 showed higher diagnostic potential than others. A combination of results from Ag85b, the 38-kDa antigen (Ag38kDa), and Ag14kDa reaches a sensitivity of 95.77%, indicating that these antigens may be ideal cocktails in TB diagnosis.