Urinary albumin fragmentation and immunoreactivity

Urinary albumin (ALB) has been measured as a marker for the early detection of diabetic nephropathy. In 2004, Comper et al. developed a gel-filtration high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) procedure for the determination of urinary ALB. They demonstrated the presence in its albumin fraction of non immunoreactive ALB with the total molecular weight of a monomeric ALB that was non-reactive with the existing anti-ALB antibody, and reported that the level of urinary non-immunoreactive ALB was higher in diabetic patients than in normal subjects. In this study, we isolated urinary ALB from diabetic patients using an anti-ALB antibody-coupled affinity column to test its immunoreactivity. In some diabetic patients, the results of HPLC and turbidimetric immunoassay for urinary ALB were discrepant. Western blot analysis showed that ALB samples from such patients were contaminated with proteins other than ALB, and contained ALB, whose molecular weight became lower using a reductive procedure. In addition, the reactivity of ALB with anti-ALB antibody differed depending on whether it was in a reduced or non-reduced state. These results indicate that ALB in such patients is susceptible to structural changes due to disease-induced urinary factors and, thus, their urine contains ALB with an altered reactivity to antibody.