Dot blot platform as a novel diagnostic kit: rapid, accurate, and on-site detection of Schistosoma mansoni in urine samples of hard to detect individuals.

Rapid diagnostics provide actionable information for patient care at the time and site of an encounter with the health care system. The mainstay of infectious diseases care is early detection (case finding) and treatment completion, but for many, it is hard to identify positive individuals, as is the case of infection with low burden in schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease common in the tropics and subtropics. We developed a new, accurate, and fast Dot blot methodology (iDot) to indirectly detect Schistosoma mansoni in individuals with very low parasite burden using urine samples.

Sm16, A Immunomodulatory Protein, Fails to Elicit a Protective Immune Response and Does Not Have an Essential Role in Parasite Survival in the Definitive Host.

Sm16 is an immunomodulatory protein that seems to play a key role in the suppression of the cutaneous inflammatory response during penetration of the skin of definitive hosts. Therefore, Sm16 represents a potential target for protective immune responses induced by vaccination. In this work, we generated the recombinant protein rSm16 and produced polyclonal antibodies against this protein to evaluate its expression during different parasite life-cycle stages and its location on the surface of the parasite.