A sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for adducts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with human serum albumin

Adducts of benzo[a]pyrene-diolepoxide (BPDE) with blood nucleophiles have been used as biomarkers of exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The most popular such assay is a competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) that employs monoclonal antibody 8E11 to detect benzo[a]pyrene tetrols following hydrolysis of BPDE adducts from lymphocyte DNA or human serum albumin (HSA). Here we used 8E11 as the capture antibody in a sandwich ELISA to detect BPDE-HSA adducts directly in 1-mg samples of HSA or 20 μl of serum/plasma. The assay employs an anti-HSA antibody for detection, and this is amplified by an avidin/biotinylated horseradish peroxidase complex. The sandwich ELISA has advantages of specificity and simplicity and is approximately 10 times more sensitive than the competitive ELISA. To validate the assay, HSA samples were assayed from three populations with known high PAH exposures (coke oven workers), medium PAH exposures (steel factory control workers), and low PAH exposures (volunteer subjects) (n = 30). The respective geometric mean levels of BPDE-HSA adducts—67.8, 14.7, and 1.93 ng/mg HSA (1010, 220, and 28.9 fmol BPDE equiv/mg HSA)—were significantly different (P < 0.05). The sandwich ELISA will be useful for screening PAH exposures in large epidemiologic studies and can be extended to other adducts for which capture antibodies are available.