| Summary: | <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Solely in Europoe, <it>Salmonella</it> Typhimurium causes more than 100,000 infections per year. Improved detection of livestock colonised with <it>S.</it> Typhimurium is necessary to prevent foodborne diseases. Currently, commercially available ELISA assays are based on a mixture of O-antigens (LPS) or total cell lysate of <it>Salmonella</it> and are hampered by cross-reaction. The identification of novel immunogenic proteins would be useful to develop ELISA based diagnostic assays with a higher specificity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A phage display library of the entire <it>Salmonella</it> Typhimurium genome was constructed and 47 immunogenic oligopeptides were identified using a pool of convalescent sera from pigs infected with <it>Salmonella</it> Typhimurium. The corresponding complete genes of seven of the identified oligopeptids were cloned. Five of them were produced in <it>E. coli</it>. The immunogenic character of these antigens was validated with sera from pigs infeced with <it>S.</it> Tyhimurium and control sera from non-infected animals. Finally, human antibody fragments (scFv) against these five antigens were selected using antibody phage display and characterised.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In this work, we identified novel immunogenic proteins of <it>Salmonella</it> Typhimurium and generated antibody fragments against these antigens completely based on phage display. Five immunogenic proteins were validated using a panel of positive and negative sera for prospective applications in diagnostics of <it>Salmonela</it> Typhimurium.</p>
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