Natural Science Forum / Biology / Microbiology / July 2007

Thank you for your help. With your specific recommendation (-assay,  
+glossary), I found what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the university  
does not a reference librarian. I am rather good with computers and  
programming, but this is a bit domain-specific to microbiology. I'm glad  
you were able to point me to the right direction.

From: Pure & Appl. Chern., Vol. 66, No. 12, pp. 2587-2604, 1994.

Hemagglutination - Agglutination reactions in which the particles used are  
erythrocytes.
Hemagglutination may be either dircct, in which erythrocyte antigens are  
reactants, or
indirect (passive) for coated antigcn or, in the case of reverse (passive)  
assays, coated
antibody. One of the most common uses of hemagglutination is to quantitate  
the number
of hemagglutinating viruses (cl: influcnza) or their soluble  
hemagglutinating surface
subunits (ref. 22).

Indirect (Passive) Agglutination - The agglutination technique in which  
antigen first is
coated artificially onto the particulate surfaces, either by physical  
absorption or chemical
or immunochemical linkage. Thcse antigen-laden particles then can be used  
to detect the
presence of the corresponding spccific agglutinins in test material.  
Agglutination results
by cross-linking of the antigen-bearing particles onto an extensive  
antigen-antibody lattice
(i.e., in detectable agglutination of the particlcs) (rcf. 22).

I hope this will stay in the usenet archive since Google didn't return so  
many results.

Lincoln