Preparation of a Chicken scFv to Analyze Gentamicin Residue in Animal Derived Food Products

Chicken is an ideal model for simplified recombinant antibody library generation. It has been rarely been reported to apply chicken single-chain variable fragments (scFvs) in immunoassays for the detection of antibiotic and chemical contaminants in animal food products. In this study, the scFvs (S-1 and S-5) were isolated from a phage display library derived from a hyperimmunized chicken. The checker board titration revealed that the optimum concentrations of S-1 and S-5 were 0.78 μg/mL and 0.44 μg/mL respectively, to obtain OD450 around 1.0 at 5 μg/mL of Gent-OVA coating concentration. Both S-1 and S-5 exhibited negligible cross reactivity with kanamycin and amikacin. The 50% inhibitory concentration (IC50) of S-1 and S-5 were 12.418 ng/mL and 14.674 ng/mL respectively. In the indirect competitive ELISA (ic-ELISA), the limits of detection for S-1 and S-5 were 0.147 ng/mL and 0.219 ng/mL respectively. The mean recovery for Gent ranged from 60.91% to 118.09% with no more than 10.35% relative standard deviation (RSD) between the intra-assay and the inter-assay. These results indicate the chicken scFv based ic-ELISA method is suitable for the detection of Gent residue in animal derived edible tissues and milk.