What is the difference between specificity and sensitivity in an immunoassay

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Group B Streptococcus capsular serotype alters vaginal colonization fitness. This is important, for example in the case of HIV or coronavirus. The more sensitive a test is, the fewer false negative results; this helps to prevent infections.

If the sensitivity of a test is high, you can also exclude diseases with it. The sensitivity of a diagnostic test depends on several things. We distinguish between technical analytical and clinical sensitivity.

Technical sensitivity indicates how well a test can detect specific molecules; easy to analyze in a laboratory. Clinical sensitivity is also related to the material examined, the level of sampling, the timing of sampling in the disease process, and so on. To illustrate: a PCR test used to detect a virus — as in the coronavirus testing site — has a decreasing sensitivity over time. This is because the excretion of the virus generally decreases over time as well.

Tests for the presence of antibodies in the body have a low initial sensitivity. After all, it takes a while for the production of antibodies to get going. A diagnostic test with a high specificity therefore has few false positives; those who test positive are indeed mostly positive. A test with a high specificity is therefore particularly suitable for confirming disease in the event of a positive result. This is important in the case of rare disorders, for example. If you use a test with a low specificity for, say, detecting cervical cancer, many women will get a false positive result.

Not desirable, because it leads to concern and upset. After all, the choice of a particular test always has consequences. These samples were then measured in the assay and the results are shown in Table 1. Polyclonal antibodies pAbs are not highly specific to one particular epitope. When pAbs are used, non-specific interactions may be detected and this can be addressed by pre-adsorbing with the secondary antibody.

Pre-adsorbed secondary antibodies can reduce non-specific background staining, which is useful for applications including IHC when working with closely homologous species.

Polyclonal antibodies are typically affinity purified and this assures specificity is assured. The level of specificity must be determined for each assay. In defining the specificity criteria for antibody selection, absence of cross reactivity with unrelated molecules is selected for antigen detection. The cross reactivities for a number of related compounds are determined by diluting the cross reactants in the assay buffer at a concentration of one hundred times the high standard then measured in the assay.

Our Oxytocin ELISA kit is highly specific with very low reactivity with vasopressin providing confidence in assay results. More recently, bead-based methods and microfluidic platforms have started to impact immunoassays and by coupling with single molecule detection, they look set to take the sensitivity of traditional ELISA to new levels. Perhaps most significantly are the big increases in assay sensitivity and the widening of the dynamic range accomplished by using alternatives to the traditional colorimetric detection and miniaturization.

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