Rapid molecular dissection of viral and bacterial immunomes

The development of preventive or therapeutic recombinant vaccines and the generation of serodiagnostic assays for infectious diseases depend essentially on the availability of molecularly defined antigens. A major bottleneck for the identification of suitable target antigens for many pathogens is the isolation of sufficient amounts of material for subsequent genomic or proteomic screening. Applying a highly efficient expression cloning strategy to the human pathogens vaccinia virus (VV) and Chlamydia pneumoniae (CP), we demonstrate that sub-nanogram amounts of isolated nucleic acids can be utilized to determine comprehensive sets of immunodominant antigens. Remarkably, the approach not only…