Development of Bioluminescence Immunoassay Using Photoprotein, Aequorin and Site-directed Immobilization

The heterogeneous bioluminescence immunoassay for digoxin was developed using photoprotein, native aequorin as a label and the site-directed immobilization technique based on avidin/biotin interaction. Aequorin is a bioluminescence protein, originally isolated from the jellyfish Aequoria Victoria and an attractive label in analytical applications because of sensitive detection due to virtually no background bioluminescent signal. Digoxin is a cardioactive drug, and its therapeutic level in serum is at low concentration with very narrow therapeutic index. The aequorin-digoxigenin conjugates were synthesized by the N-hydroxysuccinimide ester method and characterized in terms of bioluminescent residual activity. The resulting dose-response curve shows that the detection limit is $1.0\;{\times}\;10^{-10}\;M$ and a dynamic range is three orders of magnitude, which was obtained by $1.0\;{times}\;10^{-10}\;M$ conjugate and 0.9 μg/mL anti-digoxin antibody. Three structurally similar molecules to digoxin were examined for their cross-reactivity. None of these three compounds showed any crossreactivity with digoxin antibody employed in this study. Standard amounts of digoxin corresponding to the therapeutic range were spiked into the each serum solution. Study of the serum matrix effect indicated that correlation coefficient shows good agreement between luminescence light intensity between in buffer and in serum.