Quantitative Studies of the Relationship between Fecal and Serum Antibody

Abstract

A method has been developed for the quantitative measurement of the antibody response to a whole bacterial antigen, the cholera vibrio. The procedure employed was the complement fixation test of Mayer et al., modified for use with a particulate antigen. The method was applied to the study of the relative antibody content in the feces and sera of guinea pigs immunized with one intraperitoneal inoculation of cholera vibrio O vaccine. By assuming that the antibody in the feces was a measure of the rate of antibody production, and that antibody in the serum was destroyed in a first order reaction, a mathematical expression was developed for serum antibody which agrees well with the experimental data. The relative amounts of antibody in the feces and in the serum were compared with the amounts of globulin produced over the same interval of time. It is believed that the experimental data presented are consistent with the following conclusions: