Cross-reactivity between storage and dust mites and between mites and shrimp

Many patients have sensitivities to multiple species of storage and house dust mites. It is not clear if this is because patients have multiple sensitivities to species-specific mite allergens or if these mites share many cross-reacting allergens. Our objective was to further define the cross-allergenicity between several species of storage and house dust mites using crossed-immunoelectrophoresis (CIE), crossed-radioimmunoelectrophoresis (CRIE), immunoblotting, and ELISA. CIE and CRIE reactions revealed that storage mites shared two cross-antigenic molecules and one of these bound IgE in a serum pool from mite allergic patients. Antibody in anti-sera built to each species of mite recognized many SDS–PAGE resolved proteins of other mite species and this suggested the potential for other cross-reactive allergens. Among patient sera, IgE bound to many different proteins but few had IgE that bound to a protein with common molecular weights across the mite species and this suggested mostly species-specific allergens. Antiserum built to each mite species precipitated one protein in shrimp extracts that bound anti-Der p 10 (tropomyosin) and IgE in the serum pool. Anti-Der p 10 showed strong binding to shrimp tropomyosin but very little to any of the mite proteins. ELISA showed the mite extracts contained very little tropomyosin. The storage and dust mites investigated contain mostly species-specific allergens and very small amounts of the pan-allergen tropomyosin compared to shrimp and snail.