Establishment and application of an iELISA detection method for measuring apical membrane antigen 1 (AMA1) antibodies of Toxoplasma gondii in cats

BACKGROUND: Diseases caused by Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) have introduced serious threats to public health. There is an urgent need to develop a rapid detection method for T. gondii infection in cats, which are definitive hosts. Recombinant apical membrane antigen 1 (rAMA1) was produced in a prokaryotic expression system and used as the detection antigen. The aim of this study was to evaluate and optimize a reliable indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (iELISA) method based on rAMA1 for the detection of antibodies against T. gondii in cats. RESULTS: The rAMA1-iELISA method was developed and optimized by the chessboard titration method. There were no cross-reactions between T. gondii-positive cat serum and positive serum for other pathogens, indicating that rAMA1-iELISA could only detect T. gondii in most cases. The lowest detection limit of rAMA1-iELISA was 1:3200 (dilution of positive serum), and the CV of repeated tests within batches and between batches were confirmed to be less than 10%. The results of 247 cat serum samples detected by rAMA1-iELISA (kappa value = 0.622, p < 0.001) were in substantial agreement with commercial ELISA. The ROC curve analysis revealed the higher overall check accuracy of rAMA1-iELISA (sensitivity = 91.7%, specificity = 93.6%, AUC = 0.956, 95% CI 0.905 to 1.000) than GRA7-based iELISA (sensitivity = 91.7%, specificity = 85.5%, AUC = 0.936, 95% CI 0.892 to 0.980). Moreover, the positive rate of rAMA1-iELISA (6.5%, 16/247) was higher than that of GRA7-based iELISA (3.6%, 9/247) and that of commercial ELISA kit (4.9%, 12/247). CONCLUSION: The iELISA method with good specificity, sensitivity, and reproducibility was established and can be used for large-scale detection of T. gondii infection in clinical cat samples. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12917-023-03775-1.