Here, we have developed a luminescence-based SBA (L-SBA) method able to detect surviving bacteria by measuring their ATP. Even with automated colony counting, it is labor-intensive, time-consuming and not amenable for large-scale studies. The conventional SBA assay is based on plating on agar the SBA reaction mix and counting the surviving bacterial colony forming units (CFU) at each serum dilution.
To perform a typical SBA assay, serial dilutions of sera are incubated with target bacterial strains and complement.
Serum Bactericidal Activity (SBA) assay is the method of choice to evaluate the complement-mediated functional activity of both infection- and vaccine-induced antibodies.
