A new bacteriophage based luminescence assay for diagnosis of brucellosis

296-302Brucellosis is a highly contagious zoonotic disease for which accurate and cost effective pen side diagnostics are not available. Here, we explored application of bacteriophage in developing a pen side diagnostic assay for Brucellosis. We have isolated a lytic brucellaphage and exploited the phenomena of ATP release on phage mediated lysis of bacteria and ATP catalyzed luciferase - luciferin reaction to develop a novel assay for diagnosis of Brucellosis from clinical samples. Mean luminescence was 1616.333 662.608 for Brucella positive uterine secretions alone and 18507 3327.018 for phage treated positive samples. There was a significant difference (P 364.664. The difference between the luminescence of phage treated positive and negative samples was significant (P