Chemiluminescent and bioluminescent techniques.

Light-emitting chemical reactions (chemiluminescence, CL) and biological reactions (bioluminescence, BL) have a diverse range of analytical applications but relatively few have been adopted by routine clinical laboratories. Advantages of CL and BL assays include sensitivity (attomole and sub-attomole detection limits), speed (signal generated in a few seconds and in some cases stable for several hours), nonhazardous reagents, and simple procedures. The most promising clinical applications are in immunoassay, protein blotting, and DNA probe assays. Chemiluminescent molecules exploited as labels include luminol, isoluminol, acridinium esters, thioesters and sulfonamides, and phenanthridinium esters. Separation and nonseparation assays have been devised, based on isoluminol and acridinium ester labels. The combination of the amplification properties of an enzyme and a CL or BL detection reaction provides a highly sensitive analytical system. Since 1983, CL and BL methods have been developed for many enzyme labels, e.g., alkaline phosphatase, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, horseradish peroxidase, Renilla luciferase, and xanthine oxidase. Currently, the most successful enzyme assays are the enhanced CL method for a peroxidase label involving a mixture of luminol, hydrogen peroxide, and an enhancer (e.g., p-iodophenol) and the direct CL method for alkaline phosphatase, with an adamantyl 1,2-dioxetane phenyl phosphate as substrate. Both systems are very sensitive (the detection limit for alkaline phosphatase when using the dioxetane reagent is 0.001 amol) and produce long-lived light emission (greater than 30 min), which is ideal for membrane applications in which light emission is detected with photographic film or a charge-coupled device camera.