Evaluation of Two Commercial Systems for the Automated Processing, Reading and Interpretation of Lyme Western Blots

Division of Clinical Microbiology, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, Mayo Clinic and Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota 55905

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: binnicker.matthew{at}mayo.edu.

	Abstract

The diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis (LB) is commonly made by serologic testing with Western blot (WB) serving as an important supplemental assay. While specific, the interpretation of Lyme WB is subjective with considerable variability in results. In addition, the processing, reading, and interpretation of Lyme WB are laborious and time-consuming procedures. With the need for rapid processing and more objective interpretation of Lyme WB, we evaluated the performance of two automated interpretive systems, TrinBlot/BLOTrix® (Trinity Biotech, Carlsbad, CA) and BeeBlot/ViraScan® (Viramed® Biotech AG, Munich, Germany), using 518 serum specimens submitted to our laboratory for Lyme WB analysis. The results of routine testing with visual interpretation were compared to those obtained by BLOTrix analysis of MarBlot^TM IgM and IgG, and by ViraScan analysis of ViraBlot® and ViraStripe® IgM and IgG assays. BLOTrix analysis demonstrated an agreement of 84.7% for IgM and 87.3% for IgG when compared to visual reading and interpretation. ViraScan analysis of the ViraBlot assays demonstrated an agreement of 85.7% for IgM and 94.2% for IgG, while ViraScan analysis of the ViraStripe IgM and IgG assays showed an agreement of 87.1% and 93.1%, respectively. Testing on the automated systems yielded an average time-savings of 64 min/run when compared to processing, reading, and interpretation by our current procedure. Our findings demonstrated that automated processing and interpretive systems yield comparable results to visual interpretation, while reducing the subjectivity and time required for Lyme WB analysis.