A novel sandwich ELISA for α1 domain based detection of soluble HLA-G heavy chains

The detection of soluble human leukocyte antigen G (HLA-G) has been a technically demanding task for several years now and various enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) formats have been designed. However, no ELISA test has been described so far which is able to detect all possible kinds of soluble HLA-G (sHLA-G) molecules that might occur in bio fluids. Here we describe a new ELISA approach able to recognize soluble α1 domain containing heavy chains of all HLA-G isoforms. The detection limit is shown to be at about 150 pg soluble recombinant HLA-G1 heavy chain per milliliters. Detectable HLA-G fragments are shown to occur in the supernatants of different HLA-G transfected cell lines and appear to be particularly abundant in supernatant of trophoblast derived choriocarcinoma cell lines. The novel ELISA employs the well characterized HLA-G mAbs 4H84 and MEM-G1 which ensure high HLA-G specificity. A negative control ELISA format, designed against non-existing analytes, has been established to reveal non-specific signal interference.