Serum IgA, IgM, and IgG Responses in COVID-19
Dr. Huan Ma et al’s manuscript titled with ‘Serum IgA, IgM, and IgG Responses in COVID-19’ was published online at Cell Mol Immunol on 28th May, 2020. Congratulations.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32467617/
The co-first authors of this paper are Huan Ma, Weihong Zeng and Hongliang He. Prof. Tengchuan Jin, Prof. Xiaoling Ma and Dr. Yajuan Li are corresponding authors. Congratulations to all authors.
Keywords: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, IgA, IgM, IgG
Abstract:
Our team developed a set of chemical luminescence kits for detecting the presence of RBD-specific IgA, IgM, and IgG, respectively. To evaluate the diagnostic power of the these kits, 216 sera from 87 SARS-CoV-2-infected patients and a total of 483 control sera including 330 healthy sera, 138 “interfering” sera of other-type patients and 15 sera from once-suspected pneumonia cases were tested. The detected signals relative light units (RLU), for each of isotype of the RBD-specific antibodies, were plotted (Fig. 1a–c). The RBD-specific IgA, IgM, and IgG kits showed diagnostic sensitivities of 98.6%, 96.8%, and 96.8%, and specificities of 98.1%, 92.3%, and 99.8%, respectively. In order to investigate the seroconversion during COVID-19 pathogenesis, all the data from 216 sera samples were divided into six groups according to the time windows of collection after illness onset (Fig. 1d). At 4–10 days after symptom onset, the IgA kit exhibited the highest positive diagnostic rate as 88.2% (15/17), while IgM and IgG kit showed detection rates of 76.4% (13/17) and 64.7% (11/17), respectively. Including IgA in a test provides better diagnostic outcome in early stages. IgA detection shows the highest sensitivity during about 4–25 days after illness onset. The median RLU of RBD-specific IgA reached the peak during 16–20 days after illness onset, and then began to decline but remained at relatively high reading until 31–41 days. The median RLU of RBD-specific IgG was the lowest in early disease stages but raised at 15 days post illness onset, the IgG reached its peak during 21–25 days after illness onset, and stayed at a relatively high reading until 31–41 days, suggesting that IgG is powerful for diagnostics at later stages. Although IgM reached its peak at early stages, the RLU reading was lower than that of IgA or IgG. We used the data of antibody levels at the period of 16–25 days after illness onset, when all of the three isotypes reached or were near their peaks (Fig. 1e). Serum IgM and IgG levels in moderate and severe COVID-19 patients were significantly higher than mild cases, while no significant difference was observed between severe and moderate patients (Fig. 1g, h). However, we found that IgA levels in severe cases were significantly higher than those mild or moderate cases (Fig. 1f).
