Weseslindtner

The Weseslindtner research group focuses on comprehensive serology in clinical virology.

Although PCR-based techniques have become the backbone in detecting many viral infections, serological assays (testing blood serum, particularly for antibodies) also have considerable potential to diagnose and stage virus infections and syndromes (e.g., rash-like virus infections) and assess their clinical severity.  

Thus, our research aims to establish and evaluate comprehensive serological assays like antibody avidity tests, microarrays, immunoblots, surrogate neutralization tests, epitope-type specificity tests, and inflammatory chemokine assays to

• complement PCR-based techniques in the laboratory diagnosis of acute virus infections and syndromes when PCR results alone are not conclusive  (e.g., in later phases of the infection, progressed COVID-19, rash-like virus infections like measles and parvovirus B19 infections),
• stage viral infections (e.g., differentiate between acute and past infection in CMV infection and prolonged parvovirus B19 DNAemia in pregnancy),
• acquire essential seroepidemiological information (e.g., assess immunity against measles and different subvariants of SARS-CoV-2),
• differentiate between primary infections, reinfections, and vaccine breakthroughs (which, for example, in measles, differ in clinical severity and transmissibility)
• assess the inflammatory response as a correlate for the clinical severity (e.g., by measuring inflammatory messengers like chemokines in human polyoma BK virus, human cytomegalovirus, measles virus, or parvovirus B19 infections)