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First posted online 18 September 2000 ARTICLE ABSTRACT
Rec 10 May 2000; Acc 7 September 2000 DOI: 10.1099/vir.0.17140-0

Use of a TT virus ORF1 recombinant protein to detect anti-TT virus antibodies in human sera

Catherine Ott,1 Laurent Duret,2 Isabelle Chemin,3 Christian Trépo,3 Bernard Mandrand1 and Florence Komurian-Pradel1

1 Unité Mixte de Recherche 2142 CNRS-bioMérieux, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 46 Allée d'Italie, 69364 Lyon Cedex 07, France
2 Laboratoire de Biométrie Génétique et Biologie des Populations, UMR CNRS 5558, Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1, 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France
3 INSERM Unité 271, 151 Cours Albert Thomas, 69424 Lyon Cedex 03, France

TT virus (TTV), isolated initially from a Japanese patient with hepatitis of unknown aetiology, has since been found to infect both healthy and diseased individuals and numerous prevalence studies have raised questions about its role in unexplained hepatitis. In order to determine the prevalence of ongoing TTV infection as well as resolved infection, a serological study was performed with a recombinant protein generated from the open reading frame 1 (ORF1) sequence isolated from a French patient infected by TTV. The C-terminal end of the ORF1 protein, containing a particularly hydrophilic region, was retained to be used as antigen to detect the presence of anti-TTV antibodies in serum samples by a Western blot analysis. For this purpose, the C-terminal ORF1 region was expressed in fusion with a hexahistidine tail in E. coli and purified by metal-chelate affinity chromatography. The serological screening of 70 human sera, including 30 patients with hepatitis of unknown aetiology, 30 blood donors and 10 healthy children, allowed the immune response of infected hosts to be identified by the detection of TTV-specific antibodies, with a very high prevalence of 98.6 % in the human sera tested. In contrast, TTV DNA was detected by PCR in only 76.1 % of the tested sera. The use of the ORF1 C-terminal recombinant protein thereby provided a diagnostic tool to follow the immune response of the host against TTV.

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© 2000 SGM

This article is now available in the December 2000 print issue of JGV (vol. 81, 2949–2958). The complete issue of the journal may be seen in electronic form on JGV Online.