Latex agglutination analysis by novel ultrasound scattering techniques

Abstract

The latex agglutination test is employed to visualize antigen–antibody reactions through the aggregation of antibody-coated particles in the presence of an antigen. In the present study, we developed an ultrasound scattering technique to detect latex agglutination in an optically turbid media. However, the ultrasonic technique had less sensitivity to the dilute particle suspension than the optical techniques because of its wavelength. Therefore, we applied a time-correlation approach to detect small amounts of these aggregates using a sophisticated noise correction algorithm in the frequency domain. The lowest concentration of avidin used to detect aggregations of the biotin-coated particle using the ultrasound scattering technique was found to be 0.625 μg/ml. Furthermore, since the density differences between the particle and liquid were larger for silica suspensions than for polystyrene (PS) suspensions, a larger signal was proposed to be expected from silica suspensions. Nevertheless, it was found that latex agglutinations with the PS particle were more sensitive than those with the silica particles. The dynamic ultrasound scattering analysis along the sedimentation direction also supported the presence of strongly scattered intensity components of the PS aggregates, which is proposed to be due to the resonance scattering from PS spherical particles. Therefore, this technique can be employed to enhance scattering signals from particles for application in the agglutination test using ultrasound.