Isolation of virus-like particles in urine from a psoriatic patient

Virus-like particles have been isolated from urine of a psoriatic patient. A 70,000-dalton glycoprotein, gp70, located on the surface of the particles was purified by concanavalin A fractionation and immunosorbent chromatography with antibodies against virus-like particles produced by a cell culture established from a psoriatic lesion. Rabbit antiserum against purified gp70 seemed to be highly specific when anti-gp70 immunobeads reacted with detergent-disrupted urine pellet. When the immunobeads were added to urine in the absence of detergent, the proteins p27, p15, and p12 were extracted in addition to gp70. The three former proteins were radioactive labelled only after detergent-disruption of the adsorbed material in contrast to gp70. The results demonstrate that p27, p15, and p12 are located within the same particle which contains gp70 on the surface. An approximate quantitation of isolated core particles suggested that about 20 micrograms virus-like particles can be extracted from one litre urine by anti-gp70 immunobeads.