Preparation of Anti-Lomefloxacin Antibody and Development of an Indirect Competitive Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay for Detection of Lomefloxacin Residue in Milk

Abstract

Lomefloxacin has been increasingly used in veterinary medicine to treat microbial infections. To avoid using a complicated instrumental method to detect lomefloxacin residue in food, a simple and convenient indirect competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method has been developed in this study. The antibody generated from immunogen of bovine serum albumin-lomefloxacin showed high sensitivity toward lomefloxacin with an IC50 value of 0.35 ppb in PBS buffer and was suitable to be used as a screening assay to detect lomefloxacin residue in food products. The ELISA (Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbant Assay) developed in this study was compared with a commercial ELISA kit and significant improvement was achieved in terms of sensitivity and specificity. The antibody prepared showed excellent specificity with certain cross-reactivity with only two drugs including norfloxacin (17.5%) and fleroxacin (8.8%) among commonly used (fluoro)quinolones. The assay measured drug residue in defatted milk spiked with lomefloxacin with an inter-assay coefficient of variation <22.2% and an intra-assay coefficient of variation <18.2%. The average recovery rates at 0.1, 0.3, 0.6, 1.0, and 2.0 ppb were in the range of 120–85% for inter-assay and in the range of 113–90% for intra-assay.