Performance of three commercially available monoclonal reagents for confirmation of Chlamydia pneumoniae in cell culture.

We evaluated the performance of three commercially available monoclonal antibodies for confirmation of the presence of Chlamydia pneumoniae in cell culture by examining their abilities to stain inclusions of eight strains of C. pneumoniae. The antibodies tested were two unconjugated C. pneumoniae-specific monoclonal reagents and one conjugated genus-specific reagent. All three produced similar intensities of staining of C. pneumoniae, with some strain-to-strain variation. Methanol appeared to be a better choice of fixative than acetone, which greatly reduced the intensity of fluorescence with one of the species-specific antibodies.