Development and characterization of a chitosan-supported immunoaffinity chromatography column for the selective extraction of methandrostenolone from food and feed samples

Advances in the Determination of Anabolic-Androgenic Steroids: From Standard Practices to Tailor-Designed Multidisciplinary Approaches

Anabolic-androgenic steroids (AASs), a group of compounds frequently misused by athletes and, unfortunately, also by the general population, have lately attracted global attention; thus, significant demands for more precise, facile, and rapid AAS detection have arisen. The standard methods ordinarily used for AAS determination include liquid and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. However, good knowledge of steroid metabolism, pretreatment of samples (such as derivatization), and well-trained operators of the instruments are required, making this procedure expensive, complicated, and not routinely applicable. In the drive to meet current AAS detection demands, the scientific focus has shifted to developing novel, tailor-made approaches leading to time- and cost-effective, routine, and field-portable methods for AAS determination in various matrices, such as biological fluids, food supplements, meat, water, or other environmental components. Therefore, herein, we present a comprehensive review article covering recent advances in AAS determination, with a strong emphasis on the increasingly important role of chemically designed artificial sensors, biosensors, and antibody- and fluorescence-based methods.

Preparation and characterization of chitosan microparticles for immunoaffinity extraction and determination of enrofloxacin

The use of chitosan microparticles as chromatographic support has received much attention. In this study, the effects of process parameters, namely, chitosan molecular weight, chitosan concentration, molar ratio of amino group to aldehyde group, volume ratio of water to oil phase and stirring speed on the size and size distribution of chitosan microparticles and their application for immunoaffinity extraction were extensively investigated. Size distribution analysis indicated that the average diameter of the microparticles was 124μm with Span value of 1.1. The obtained microparticles exhibited low non-specific adsorption and kept stable in the pH range 4.0-10.0. Immunoaffinity chromatography (IAC) column was prepared by coupling antibody against enrofloxacin (ENR) with chitosan microparticles. Further characterization indicated that the binding capacity of the column was 4392ng ENR/mL gel and the variation of ENR extraction efficiency among columns was less than 5.2%. When challenged with ENR-fortified bovine milk samples, recoveries of ENR by immunoaffinity extraction were found to be in the range of 85.9% to 101.9%, demonstrated the feasibility of the prepared IAC columns for sample clean-up in ENR residue determination.

Preparation and application of an immunoaffinity column based on an antibody with strong affinity and packing material with good stability

This article describes the production of an anti-citrinin antibody that showed a high affinity constant (Ka) of 6.28 × 10⁹ and good tolerance to organic solvent and low pH, the synthesis of a Cu (II)-embedded polymer that showed strong binding with this antibody and the preparation of packing material for an immunoaffinity column (IAC) that show good stability. Most of the IACs reported either use harsh elution conditions and are used only once or use gentle elution conditions and are reused many times. Here, through the combined use of a strong-affinity antibody and packing material with good stability, high recoveries during clean-up and yet simultaneously good stability of the IAC were successfully achieved. Under optimised conditions of 80% methanol (pH 3), the IACs were used to clean-up the extracts of Monascus colour and red yeast rice samples, followed by HPLC detection. The recoveries of citrinin from spiked samples at levels of 50-200 μg kg⁻¹ were in the range of 84-97%.

Preparation of an immunoaffinity column for the clean-up of fermented food samples contaminated with citrinin

An immunoaffinity column (IAC) for the clean-up of citrinin-contaminated food samples was prepared by using silica gel immobilised with a anti-citrinin antibody. Antibodies produced against citrinin-bovine serum albumin (BSA) were covalently immobilised onto a silica-based solid support to prepare the IAC. The selective extraction and clean-up ability of the IAC was evaluated by capillary zone electrophoresis coupled with ultraviolet detection. Clean-up conditions such as eluting solutions kind, concentrations, pH and volumes were optimised for citrinin by using the IAC. IACs were applied to citrinin-contaminated foods such as red yeast rice and monascus colour. The method's performance was acceptable in terms of recoveries, which ranged from 80.4% to 97.1% for citrinin-spiked samples at levels of 50, 100 and 200 µg kg(-1), and the relative standard deviation ranged from 5.3% to 10.5%.

Poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) brush surface for specific and oriented adsorption of glycosidases

We present a detailed picture to screen general ligands from simple chemicals for fabricating affinity surface to glycosidase enzymes. The surface was constructed by grafting poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (PHEMA) brush on SPR gold chip via surface-initiated atom-transfer radical polymerization, after which poly(methoxyethyl methacrylate) (PMEMA) and poly(oligo(ethylene glycol) methacrylate) (POEGMA) brushes were also prepared for comparison. SPR measurements were adopted to monitor the early-stage adsorption of two glycosidases and three other typical proteins. PHEMA resists the adsorption of lysozyme, bovine serum albumin, and fibrinogen, while it is capable of specifically adsorbing β-glucosidase (GLU) and β-galactosidase (GAL). These are quite different from the nonspecific adsorption of PMEMA and the anti-nonspecific adsorption of POEGMA to the studied proteins, because PHEMA is the acceptor substrate of the glycosidases. About 69.6 and 93.7 ng/cm(2) of GAL and GLU are adsorbed on the PHEMA brush surface, of which more than 49.6 ng/cm(2) is remained after washing with PBS. The specific adsorption process is appropriately described by Freundlich isothermal model rather than Langmuir one, and is also indicated to be spontaneous, endothermic, and entropy driven through thermodynamic studies. Taking into account all stated results above, we propose that molecular recognition takes place between the hydroxyl groups of PHEMA and the active sites of glycosidases, which subsequently enables the oriented adsorption of glycosidases on the brush surface. The adsorbed enzyme can be effectively eluted with 1.0 M aqueous solution of ethanol. Our findings open the door to the further development in the design of novel acceptor substrate-ligand affinity chromatography for enzyme purification.