A versatile, high through-put, bead-based phagocytosis assay for Plasmodium falciparum.

Lloyd YM, Ngati EP, Salanti A, Leke RGF, Taylor DW.

Citation

Lloyd YM, Ngati EP, Salanti A, Leke RGF, Taylor DW. (2017) A versatile, high through-put, bead-based phagocytosis assay for Plasmodium falciparum. Scientific Reports 7(1):14705.

Abstract

Antibody-mediated phagocytosis is an important immune effector mechanism against Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes (IE); however, current phagocytosis assays use IE collected from infected individuals or from in vitro cultures of P. falciparum, making them prone to high variation. A simple, high-throughput flow cytometric assay was developed that uses THP-1 cells and fluorescent beads covalently-coupled with the malarial antigen VAR2CSA. The assay is highly repeatable, provides both the overall percent phagocytosis and semi-quantitates the number of antigen-coupled beads internalized.