Development of indirect competitive ELISA for determination of dehydroabietic acid in duck skin and comparison with the HPLC method

Defeathering with rosin results in rosin residue in duck skin, which may present as potential risk to human health. Dehydroabietic acid (DHAA) is a major component of rosin. An indirect competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was developed for determination of DHAA in duck skin. A set of parameters was optimized, including coating antigen concentration, dilution of antiserum, dilution of HRP-IgG antibody, incubation time, and temperature for antigen reaction with antiserum. The indirect competitive ELISA yielded an excellent specificity against DHAA with low cross-reactivity toward other resin acids. The limit of detection and the working concentration range of DHAA in duck skin were 16.4 ng/g and from 40 to 8,060 ng/g, respectively. The indirect competitive ELISA was applied to the determination of DHAA in duck skin samples spiked with DHAA at different contents, and recoveries were found between 78.2 and 97.2%. Finally, DHAA contents in 32 duck samples were quantified by the indirect competitive ELISA and high performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence detector (HPLC-FLD) method. No significant difference was found between DHAA concentrations from indirect competitive ELISA and HPLC-FLD method for all samples, which indicated the indirect competitive ELISA established in this article was of the same accuracy as the HPLC-FLD method. The indirect competitive ELISA was simple, rapid, and reliable, which could be used to identify the duck carcasses defeathered with rosin in the market.