Establishment of optimized ELISA system specific for HLA-G in body fluids

Recently, human leukocyte antigen-G (HLA-G) has been a focus in the field of reproductive immunology, tumor progression and transplantation, because of its inhibitory function as ligand to the inhibitory receptors leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptors (LILR) B1 and LILRB2. The HLA-G is expressed in distinct mRNA isoforms, one of which encodes a soluble HLA-G (sHLA-G) protein, detectable by sandwich ELISA. Therefore, sHLA-G ELISAs have been used as a noninvasive diagnosis system. While a number of sHLA-G-specific ELISAs have been described, our prior studies showed that data obtained by the conventional ELISA system detecting sHLA-G in body fluids was not consistent with the data obtained from immunoprecipitation (IP)/immunoblotting (IB). Therefore, we established an optimized ELISA system described in this report, which yields results consistent with IP/IB analysis. Using this system, we determined sHLA-G protein in amniotic fluids, and found that sHLA-G levels at preterm (∼36 weeks) were clearly higher than those at term (37-41 weeks). These data and supporting experiments showed that the ELISA system we established can be an useful tools for the detection of sHLA-G protein in body fluids than the conventional ELISA system.