DEVELOPMENT OF A SAMPLE PREPARATION SYSTEM FOR DIOXINS: APPLICATION TO IMMUNOASSAY

ORGANOHALOGEN COMPOUNDS – Volume 66 (2004) 677 Introduction Dioxins are highly toxic and bioaccumulative compounds among persistent organic pollutants, and their environmental monitoring and screening are essential. In Japan, conventional testing for dioxins uses the Japan Industrial Standard method (JIS K 0311). This method is expensive and has a relatively slow analytical cycle time. This constrains the number of samples that can be economically tested in projects, leading to uncertainties in the application and interpretation of results for management of site remediation. Immunoassay and bioassay are one way of overcoming these problems. However, there still remain several problems in clean-up for dioxins contaminated environmental matrices and in analytical complications such as solvent concentration and substitution. For a wide recognition of these assays as monitoring and screening, a suitable pretreatment method for the assay systems should be developed for all sorts of measurements of analyte. This study was carried out to develop the automated sample preparation system of dioxins for immunoassay, and the following items were examined; (1) the efficiency of purification by heating multi-layer silica gel column, (2) solvent substitution method using solid-phase adsorbents, and (3) application to immunoassay.