A simple protein-based surrogate neutralization assay for SARS-CoV-2
By
Kento T Abe,
Zhijie Li,
Reuben Samson,
Payman Samavarchi-Tehrani,
Emelissa J Valcourt,
Heidi Wood,
Patrick Budylowski,
Alan P. Dupuis,
Roxie C. Girardin,
Bhavisha Rathod,
Jenny H. Wang,
Miriam Barrios-Rodiles,
Karen Colwill,
Allison J McGeer,
Samira Mubareka,
Jennifer L Gommerman,
Yves Durocher,
Mario Ostrowski,
Kathleen A. McDonough,
Michael A. Drebot,
Steven J. Drews,
James M Rini,
Anne-Claude Gingras
Posted 11 Jul 2020
bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/2020.07.10.197913
(published DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.142362)
Most of the patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mount a humoral immune response to the virus within a few weeks of infection, but the duration of this response and how it correlates with clinical outcomes has not been completely characterized. Of particular importance is the identification of immune correlates of infection that would support public health decision-making on treatment approaches, vaccination strategies, and convalescent plasma therapy. While ELISA-based assays to detect and quantitate antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in patient samples have been developed, the detection of neutralizing antibodies typically requires more demanding cell-based viral assays. Here, we present a safe and efficient protein-based assay for the detection of serum and plasma antibodies that block the interaction of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD) with its receptor, angiotensin converting-enzyme 2 (ACE2). The assay serves as a surrogate neutralization assay and is performed on the same platform and in parallel with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the detection of antibodies against the RBD, enabling a direct comparison. The results obtained with our assay correlate with those of two viral based assays, a plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT) that uses live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and a spike pseudotyped viral-vector-based assay. ### Competing Interest Statement Steven J Drews has acted as a content expert for respiratory viruses for Johnson & Johnson (Janssen). Questcap provided funds to the Gingras and Mubareka labs for this project. The other authors declare no relevant conflicts of interest.
Download data
- Downloaded 1,245 times
- Download rankings, all-time:
- Site-wide: 13,470
- In immunology: 362
- Year to date:
- Site-wide: 11,989
- Since beginning of last month:
- Site-wide: 10,266
Altmetric data
Downloads over time
Distribution of downloads per paper, site-wide
PanLingua
News
- 27 Nov 2020: The website and API now include results pulled from medRxiv as well as bioRxiv.
- 18 Dec 2019: We're pleased to announce PanLingua, a new tool that enables you to search for machine-translated bioRxiv preprints using more than 100 different languages.
- 21 May 2019: PLOS Biology has published a community page about Rxivist.org and its design.
- 10 May 2019: The paper analyzing the Rxivist dataset has been published at eLife.
- 1 Mar 2019: We now have summary statistics about bioRxiv downloads and submissions.
- 8 Feb 2019: Data from Altmetric is now available on the Rxivist details page for every preprint. Look for the "donut" under the download metrics.
- 30 Jan 2019: preLights has featured the Rxivist preprint and written about our findings.
- 22 Jan 2019: Nature just published an article about Rxivist and our data.
- 13 Jan 2019: The Rxivist preprint is live!