Investigation of immune complex dissociation reagents and their application in detecting HCV antigen

Antigen is one of infectious markers prior to antibody.Antigen test has been proven to be able to remedy loss of detection in window period caused by antibody test.Currently,hat antigens forming immune complex with antibodies leads to lower detection rate is exactly the reason why antigen test is less used.The optimal method of dissociation was optimized by screening time temperature and etc.regarding HAV antigen-antibody complex,time of acidizing and composition of detergents,and was applied in 1370 HCV serum samples for making statistics and analysis of antigen positive rate before and after dissociation.We inferred from results the optimal condition of dissociation was presented by using Gly-HCl+7%TritonX-100 + 5% CHAP for 30 minutes at 37 ℃.The application of this method in HCV antigen test has been proven to enable HCV antigen positive detection rate to improve to 75.56% from 33.3% before dissociation,and to enable differences in positive rate before and after dissociation to have markedly statistical significances(χ2=32.34,P0.01).Hence,it can be considered that this method can dissociate immune complex formed by HCV so as to improve detection rate of HCV antigen.