Production of a Natural Dihydropteroate Synthase and Development of a Signal-Amplified Pseudo-Immunoassay for the Determination of Sulfonamides in Pork.

In this study, a type of magnetic photoaffinity-labeled activity-based protein profiling probe for sulfonamide drugs was first synthesized for the purpose of capturing the natural dihydropteroate synthase of e by using simple incubation and magnetic separation. After characterization of its identity with LC-ESI-MS/MS, this enzyme was used as a recognition reagent to develop a direct competitive pseudo-ELISA for the determination of the residues of 40 sulfonamides in pork. Because of the use of streptavidin-horseradish peroxidase and biotinylated horseradish peroxidase as a signal-amplified system, the limits of detection for the 40 drugs were in the range of 0.001-0.016 ng/mL. Compared to the steps in a conventional assay formation, the operation steps were the same, but the sensitivities increased 32-88-fold. Furthermore, the assay performances were better than the previously reported immunoassays performances for sulfonamides. Therefore, this method could be used as a practical tool for multiscreening the trace levels of sulfonamides residues in food samples.