Nicotine enzyme immunoassay.

In the present study of the use of racemic aminonicotine as a functionalized hapten, nicotine antibodies suitable for use in nicotine determinations have been produced from antigens in which both 'flexible' and 'semi-rigid' chains serve to couple racemic 6-aminonicotine to bovine serum albumin. Nicotine enzyme immunoassay has been developed for the first time using antibodies produced against 6-epsilon-aminocapramido -DL-nicotine and beta-galactosidase nicotine enzyme. The assay is a double antibody method which requires 60 and 15 min incubation respectively. The correlation of nicotine pooled plasma was found to be 0.994 with very good precision and accuracy. The sensitivity, defined as the concentration of nicotine measured at delta F/delta Fo = 90%, was found to be 10 micrograms/1. Samples of human smokers (N = 9) after 1 cigarette at 3 min were 50-100 micrograms/1, and at 15 min were 30-60 micrograms/1.