Development of a highly sensitive and specific monoclonal antibody based enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay for the detection of a new β‐agonist, phenylethanolamine A, in food samples

BACKGROUND All β‐agonists are banned as feed additives for growth promotion in animals due to toxic effects on humans after consuming the β‐agonist contaminated meats. Phenylethanolamine A ( PA ) is a newly emerged β‐agonist. Thus there is a need to develop highly sensitive and specific analytical methods for the detection of PA in food samples. In this study, the monoclonal antibody ( mAb ) against PA was produced by hybridoma technology and used for the development of enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay ( ELISA ). RESULTS The IC 50 values and limits of detection ( LODs ) of the ELISA using homogeneous combination of coating antigen/antibody for PA were 0.16 ng mL −1 and 0.011 ng mL −1 , respectively. The cross‐reactive ( CR ) values of the assay with 14 structurally related β‐agonists were lower than 0.59%. Swine liver and meat samples were spiked with PA at different content and analysed by ELISA . Acceptable recovery rates of 91.40–105.51% and intra‐assay coefficients of variation of 1.56–9.92% ( n = 3) were obtained. The ELISA for seven spiked samples was confirmed by LC‐MS / MS with a high correlation coefficient of 0.9881. CONCLUSION The proposed mAb ‐based ELISA was highly sensitive and specific for PA and could be used as a quantitative/screening method for PA analysis in food samples. © 2016 Society of Chemical Industry