Comparison of zonal elution and nonlinear chromatography in determination of the interaction between seven drugs and immobilised β2-adrenoceptor

• Zonal elution and NLC were compared on β2-adrenoceptor–drug interaction.
• NLC exhibits high precision and short analysis time on drug–protein interactions.
• NLC is a rapid and high-throughput method on drug–protein interactions.

Zonal elution and nonlinear chromatography are two mainstream models for the determination of drug-protein interaction in affinity chromatography. This work intended to compare the results by zonal elution with that by nonlinear chromatography when it comes to the analysis of the interaction between seven drugs and immobilised β2-adrenoceptor (β2-AR). The results of the zonal elution showed that clorprenaline, clenbuterol, methoxyphenamine, salbutamol, terbutaline, tulobuterol and bambuterol have only one type of binding site on immobilised β2-AR, while nonlinear chromatography confirmed the existence of at least two types of binding sites between β2-AR and clorprenaline, clenbuterol and bambuterol. On these sites, both zonal elution and nonlinear chromatography presented the same rank order for the association constants of the seven drugs. Compared with the data from zonal elution, the association constants calculated using nonlinear chromatography gave a good linear response to the corresponding values by radio-ligand binding assay. The sampling efficiencies of nonlinear chromatography were clearly higher than zonal elution. Nonlinear chromatography will probably become a powerful alternative for the high throughput determination of drug-protein interaction.