A secondary antibody format chemiluminescence immunoassay for the determination of estradiol in human serum

A competitive immunoassay for estradiol (E2) based on secondary antibody format was established. The donkey anti-rabbit IgG was used as the secondary antibody to coat micro-plates, and the horseradish peroxidase (HRP)–luminol–H2O2 chemiluminescent system with high sensitivity was chosen as the detection system. The addition of sodium trichloroacetate (CCl3COONa) in the enzyme buffer as a replaceable packing material can realize directly analysis of E2 in human serum without extraction, which improved reproducibility and resolution of the assay. Additionally, the method showed specific recognition of estrogen, without cross-reaction for the major steroids (estrone (E1), estriol (E3), dihydrotestosterone (DHT), androstenedione, testosterone (T)) commonly found in human serum. The chemiluminescence immunoassay with secondary antibody can be applied to detect E2 with good precision at concentrations as low as 1.48 pg mL−1. The proposed method has been successfully applied to the determination of E2 in 97 human sera and showed a good correlation compared with the commercially radioimmunoassay (RIA) kit with a correlative coefficient of 0.9881. This method has exhibited great potential in the fabrication of diagnostic kit and can be used in the clinical analysis of E2 in human serum.