Are there any obvious technical limitations that would make it impractical to use an antibody coating, using the same techniques used in ELISA, to capture targeted viral particles through a slow flowing sewage source?
It is possible. However, ELISA has a typical detection limitation of 10-100pg protein in 100ul buffer, corresponding to ~10^4 viral particle. Being practical, this often exceeds the viral titer in sewage source. Antibody binding depends on the value of association constant dividing dissociation constant. lower concentration of antigen in solution would result in antigen-antibody dissociation. so slowing down the flow could not solve this problem.
Hi Shaun Stewart . There are no theoretical limitations, only technical and practical problems. A major technical and practical problem is how to report antibody binding in real time and in a non static (flow) situation.
Maybe some technology like https://www.hememics.com/ will be useful
Theoretically possible but technically extremely difficult and costly.
To do what you propose would require passing the sewage through a capture system that would have to be above ground in order to be replaceable. It would have to be large enough to allow sufficient volume throughput so as not to back up the sewer system. The reason it would have to be replaceable is that no matter how much antibody you incorporate into your system, it will eventually become saturated and will need to be replaced or regenerated.
Coating the inside of the pipe - which would have to be a polymer to get antibody binding - would be inadequate for the job. You would have to pass the sewage through a matrix of some kind such as styrene beads in order to have the surface area necessary to bind up any viral particles in the sewage. This would require a screen filter at both ends to prevent the matrix from clogging from the influx or being pushed out the efflux end of the system.
Furthermore the amount of anti-virus antibody you would need to generate a capture system of sufficient size for filtering sewage flow is staggering. We are talking kilogram amounts. I used to do protein sequencing of myeloma protein. We did gram preps that would require producing ascities in batches of 100 mice. Scale that up by a factor of 1000 or more.
Given these sort of parameters, I consider what you propose doing too technically complicated and too costly to be practical.
If you don't need real on-line sampling, you could periodically collect samples, clear them and then pass them through columns with immobilized antibodies, e.g using an activated resin like NHS activated sepharose.
Or use a resonant chip (MEMS) with immobilized antibodies that you simply can immerse into the sewage flow.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Immunology
- Antibodies