Sensitive immunoassays of nitrated fibrinogen in human biofluids

Three new sandwich immunoassays for detection of nitrated biomarker have been established with potential applications in biomedical studies and clinical practice. In this study, nitrated human fibrinogen, a potential oxidative stress biomarker for several pathologies, was chosen as the target. To improve the sensitivity and overcome the interference caused by the complexity of human biofluids, we developed three sandwich strategies using various combinations of primary antibody and secondary antibody. All three strategies demonstrated high sensitivity and selectivity towards nitrated forms of fibrinogen in buffer, but their performances were dramatically reduced when tested with human plasma and serum samples. Systematically optimizations were carried out to investigate the effects of numerous factors, including sampling, coating, blocking, and immunoreactions. Our final optimization results indicate that two of these strategies retain sufficient sensitivity and selectivity for use as assays in human physiological samples. Specifically, detection limits reached the pM level and the linear response ranges were up to nM level with a correlation coefficient > 0.99. To our best knowledge, this is the first example of using an electrochemical immunoassay for a nitrated biomarker in a physiological fluid. This novel approach provides a rapid, sensitive, selective, cost efficient and robust bioassay for detection of oxidative stress in pathology and for clinical applications. Moreover, the sandwich strategies developed in this paper can be readily used to establish effective methods targeting other nitration biomarkers.