Molecular diagnostics of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies

Prion Disease Detection, PMCA Kinetics, and IgG in Urine from Sheep Naturally/Experimentally Infected with Scrapie and Deer with Preclinical/Clinical Chronic Wasting Disease

“…Although the highest concentration of PrP Sc is present in the central nervous system, its presence has been reported with a variable degree of success in peripheral tissues, such as lymphoid organs, peripheral nerves, skeletal muscle, kidney, mammary glands, olfactory mucosa, and cerebrospinal fluid (1,18,31). Blood and urine represent the ideal biological fluids for routine diagnosis.…”

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE): Its context in New Zealand and new tests

“…(Ingrosso et al 2002), which is likely to be above initial incubation concentrations since the minimum infectious dose of hamster scrapie has been estimated at 10 4 -10 5 PrP Sc molecules, or 1 femtomol of PrP C (Prusiner 1982). An infectivity assay, mouse lesion profiling bioassay as modified to account for genotype (Ligios et al 2002), or mice transgenic for particular species of PrP C (Safar et al 2002), will likely remain as the standard bioassays for the diagnosis of TSE strains, but a cell-culture bioassay could be cheaper, more sensitive, and faster to conduct than mouse tests (Klohn et al 2003).…”

Fluorescent Immunoassay Development for PrPSc Detection and Antemortem Diagnosis of TSEs

“…It has been suggested that the successful detection of PrP Sc in biological fluids may be dependent on the ability to concentrate the samples (Wardsworth et al, 2001;Ingrosso et al, 2002); this is important because of the comparatively low level of TSE infectivity outside of the central nervous system (CNS) (Bruce et al, 2001;Hill et al, 1997;Ramasamy et al, 2003). As an effort to increase the sensitivity of the current immunoassay, application of various concentration steps for PrP Sc to the assay procedure has been tested.…”