A novel antibody immobilization and its application in immunoaffinity chromatography

A novel antibody immobilization and its application in immunoaffinity chromatography (IAC) were presented. Using acrylamide (AM) as monomer, ethylene glycoldimethacrylate (EGDMA) as cross-linker and bulk polymerization as synthetic method, we prepared a polymer in which the Cu(II) was embedded. The Cu(II)-embedded polymer was tested for its binding with protein. It was found that Cu(II)-embedded polymer displayed a strong binding with bovine serum albumin (BSA). At 80% of methanol, no BSA was released from Cu(II)-embedded polymer. The Cu(II)-embedded polymer was then used as a novel solid support for antibody immobilization. IAC column was prepared by immobilizing polyclonal antibody (pAb) against clenbuterol (CL) on Cu(II)-embedded polymer and packing the Cu(II)-embedded polymer-pAb into a common solid phase extraction (SPE) cartridge. Under optimal extraction conditions, the IAC column was characterized in terms of maximum binding capacity for target analyte, extraction efficiency and reusability. It was revealed that, for IAC column packed with 0.1 g of solid support immobilized with antibody, the maximum capacity for CL was 616 ng; the extraction recoveries of the column for CL from three spiked food samples were 84.4-95.2% with relative standard deviation (RSD) of 9.3-15.5%; after more than 30 times repeated usage, there was not significant loss of specific recognition. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the prepared IAC column for CL extraction. The proposed antibody immobilization method exhibiting the properties of simplicity, low cost, strong binding for target analyte, no leaching of antibody, etc., would be a very useful tool applied in the field of IAC.