Combined Assay for Detecting Autoantibodies to Nucleic Acids and Apolipoprotein H in Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

The complicated clinical picture and biomolecular pattern of human autoimmune diseases (ADs) make knowledge on their etiology still fragmentary. The diagnostic approaches for ADs require improvement both for clinical and research effort to progress. Synthetic biomolecular antigens find growing applications for diagnosis and investigation of ADs. The main goal of this work is to detect interaction between synthetic antigens and autoantibodies in systemic lupus erythematosus within a combined, high-throughput assay. A panel of synthetic antigens has been prepared from DNA, RNA, locked nucleic acids and apolipoprotein H. The binding of synthetic antigens to autoantibodies has been confirmed in sera samples from those with active systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) by indirect enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. Our study provides an efficient methodology for combined autoantibody profiling in SLE.