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 Escherichia coli 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.