Promising alternatives for one-tier testing of Lyme borreliosis

A main focus of human health studies is the early detection of infectious diseases to enable more rapid treatment and prevent disease transmission. Diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis has been always challenging because of the lack of specific, but simple assay formats. Two-tiered testing has been recommended by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to provide more specific results for diagnosis of Lyme disease. However, such a technique is time consuming and is not well suited for early stage detection. Therefore, many tests were proposed as alternatives to overcome these drawbacks. Simple assays, which are mainly performed in one-tier manner, could be conducted with better performance than the two-tiered testing. Proposed assays utilize both newly identified antigens and new platforms to improve detection performance. These assays can be classified into those based on employing a single antigen and assays based on using multiple antigens. In addition to assays to this type of assays, immunoassays on borreliosis-related biomarkers are available. We report here the most recent assays developed over the last 10 years, for detection of Lyme borreliosis in body fluids.