抄録
Today, the demand for Japanese traditional herbal medicines, the so-called Kampo medicines, and their crude drug components has dramatically increased due to increased interest in health foods and complementary and alternative medicines. Since the content of active compounds in crude drugs affects their various pharmacological activities, quality control related to the content of these active components is required. To date, various methods have been developed for their quantitative analysis, including HPLC-UV, gas chromatography, and quantitative NMR. However, these methods require large amounts of eco-unfriendly organic solvents, costly instruments, and time-consuming sample pretreatment. Immunoassays overcome these drawbacks by taking advantage of principles based on antigen−antibody reactions, thus enabling establishment of simple, specific, and sensitive quantitative analysis without sample pretreatment procedures. In one of our previous studies, we focused on two natural products, plumbagin and amarogentin, isolated mainly from Plumbago zeylanica (Plumbaginaceae) and the plants genus, Swertia and Gentiana (Gentianaceae), respectively. We produced specific antibodies (monoclonal antibody (mAb), single-chain variable fragment (scFv), and fluobody) and developed immunoassays, including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), fluorescence-linked immunosorbent assay (FLISA), immunochromatographic strip assay (ICA), and magnetic particles-based enzyme immunoassay (MPs-EIA). In this review article, production of these antibodies and their applications in immunoassays are described. In addition, an application of scFv in plant molecular breeding is also described.
