Rational design and high-yield expression of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen for a sensitive and specific in-house ELISA
Abbas Tazarghi, Mehdi Behrouzikhah, Hamidreza Abbasi, Mohsen Ebrahimi, Alijan Tabarraei, Ahad Yamchi, Hadi Razavi Nikoo · 2026
Read Rational design and high-yield expression of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen for a sensitive and specific in-house ELISA by Abbas Tazarghi, Mehdi Behrouzikhah, Hamidreza Abbasi, Mohsen Ebrahimi, Alijan Tabarraei, Ahad Yamchi, Hadi Razavi Nikoo (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13491942.txt.
Description
Abbas Tazarghi and six colleagues engineer in 2026 a coronavirus antigen designed from scratch to power a home-grown antibody test. The nucleocapsid protein is the most abundant and stable target in the virus. The team optimized its gene for bacterial production, tuning codons, ribosome binding, and message structure before expressing it in E coli.
The purified protein anchored an in-house ELISA that was checked against a commercial kit on thirty-seven known positive and fifteen negative blood samples. Both tests were perfectly specific, calling every negative correctly. The home-grown version caught more true positives, reaching about ninety-two percent sensitivity against eighty-four for the kit, with a better overall accuracy curve. The authors frame the platform as a cheaper surveillance tool for the post-pandemic period.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Abbas Tazarghi, Mehdi Behrouzikhah, Hamidreza Abbasi, Mohsen Ebrahimi, Alijan Tabarraei, Ahad Yamchi, Hadi Razavi Nikoo |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 51635 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |