Natural and recombinant bovine somatotropin: immunodetection with a sandwich ELISA

Bovine Somatotropin (bST) is a peptide hormone secreted by the anterior pituitary gland and its recombinant form (rbST) is used for artificially boosting milk yield in cows. Identification of rbST is difficult in that there is little difference from the pituitary bST (pbST). In this work, we further studied the possibility of immunologically discriminating between rbST and pbST. With this purpose, we produced mouse monoclonal antibodies using, as antigen, a peptide mimicking the N-terminus of rbST from Monsanto (rbST-M) conjugated to keyhole limpet haemocyanin (KLH) and polyclonal antibodies in rabbits immunized with the whole bST or rbST-M. Hence, we developed a sandwich ELISA with the obtained antibodies for detection and quantification of bST in serum and compared its performance on the two worldwide commercialized rbSTs: rbST-M and rbST from LG Life Science (rbST-LG). The lowest detection limit of the assay was 0.05 ng/ml for rbST-M, 0.10 ng/ml for rbST-LG and 0.15 ng/ml for pbST. Furthermore, the assay showed the capability to amplify the signal in the presence of rbSTs, recognizing more efficiently rbST-M and rbST-LG than pbST (ECn pbST/ECn rbST: 3 and 1.6 respectively). Its employment for measuring bST levels in sera from bovines administered with rbST LG allowed us to detect exceptional values due to the treatment itself and probably further increased as a consequence of the higher affinity for rbSTs of our monoclonal antibody.