Optimization of ELISA Conditions to Quantify Colorectal Cancer Antigen-Antibody Complex Protein (GA733-FcK) Expressed in Transgenic Plant

The purpose of this study is to optimize ELISA conditions to quantify the colorectal cancer antigen GA733 linked to the Fc antibody fragment fused to KDEL, an ER retention motif (GA733-FcK) expressed in transgenic plant. Variable conditions of capture antibody, blocking buffer, and detection antibody for ELISA were optimized with application of leaf extracts from transgenic plant expressing GA733-FcK. In detection antibody, anti-EpCAM/CD362 IgG recognizing the GA733 did not detect any GA733-FcK whereas anti-human Fc IgG recognizing the human Fc existed in plant leaf extracts. For blocking buffer conditions, 3% BSA buffer clearly blocked the plate, compared to the 5% skim-milk buffer. For capture antibody, monoclonal antibody (MAb) CO17-1A was applied to coat the plate with different amounts (1, 0.5, and 0.25 μg/well). Among the amounts of the capture antibody, 1 and 0.5 μg/well (capture antibody) showed similar absorbance, whereas 0.25 μg/well of the capture antibody showed significantly less absorbance. Taken together, the optimized conditions to quantify plant-derived GA733-FcK were 0.5 μg/well of MAb CO17-1A per well for the capture antibody, 3% BSA for blocking buffer, and anti-human Fc conjugated HRP. To confirm the optimized ELISA conditions, correlation analysis was conducted between the quantified amount of GA733-FcK in ELISA and its protein density values of different leaf samples in Western blot. The co-efficient value R(2) between the ELISA quantified value and protein density was 0.85 (p0.01), which indicates that the optimized ELISA conditions feasibly provides quantitative information of GA733-FcK expression in transgenic plant.