Quantitative Studies of the Relationship between Fecal and Serum Antibody

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Abstract
Summary and Conclusions: A method has been developed for the quantitative measurement of the antibody response to a whole bacterial antigen, the cholera vibrio. The procedure employed was the complement fixation test of Mayer et al., modified for use with a particulate antigen. The method was applied to the study of the relative antibody content in the feces and sera of guinea pigs immunized with one intraperitoneal inoculation of cholera vibrio O vaccine. By assuming that the antibody in the feces was a measure of the rate of antibody production, and that antibody in the serum was destroyed in a first order reaction, a mathematical expression was developed for serum antibody which agrees well with the experimental data. The relative amounts of antibody in the feces and in the serum were compared with the amounts of globulin produced over the same interval of time. It is believed that the experimental data presented are consistent with the following conclusions: The agglutinating and complement-fixing antibodies to the vibrio O antigen are closely similar if not identical.Fecal antibody behaves independently of serum antibody, and therefore is not derived from it.Fecal antibody is a measure of the rate of antibody formation.Serum antibody represents accumulated antibody, and decays in a first order reaction.The correlation between the ratios of fecal to serum antibody and fecal to serum globulin suggests that the fecal globulin also represents the rate of globulin production.