Progesterone camel ELISA

>Background:For efficient management of a camel herd, it is essential to diagnose pregnancy as accurately and as soon as possible after mating so that if the camel is not pregnant, it can be re-mated or covered again. There are several methods that can be used to diagnose pregnancy in camels. As the corpus luteum is essential to maintain the pregnancy in camels, progesterone hormone level is a very useful tool to monitor pregnancy in camels and used as a biomarker of early pregnancy detection in female dromedary camel. In the mated dromedary, serum progesterone concentrations increase from day three after ovulation. If the camel is not pregnant, concentrations rapidly return to basal levels by days 10-12, however, if she is pregnant the progesterone concentrations are maintained for the first 90 - 100 days of gestation. According to some studies, progesterone levels then decrease slightly where they remain until day 300. A further slight decrease then occurs over the next 70 - 80 days followed by a rapid drop on the day before, or the day of parturition. Other studies have shown a gradual decrease in progesterone concentration from 5 months of gestation until parturition. However, it must be emphasized that, regardless of the method used, a single pregnancy diagnosis does not guarantee a birth, especially if done at a very early stage (i.e. before 40 - 50 days post mating). This is due in part to errors in diagnosis, but is also due to the high incidence of early embryo loss seen in these species. Further examinations should therefore be carried out at 3-4 months of gestation to ensure the pregnancy is developing normally.

Description:
The test kit is a solid phase competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in the microtiter plate format with liquid phase incubation for the quantitative measurement of camel progesterone in serum or EDTA plasma samples. The microtiter plate is coated with a polyclonal anti-progesterone antiserum. Calibrators and samples are pipetted into the antibody-coated microtiter plate, followed by addition of a Biotin-Labeled Progesterone and Incubation Buffer. After an incubation of 1 h, non-reactive components are removed by a washing procedure of the plate. In the next step Enzyme-Labeled Streptavidine is added. Nonreactive components are removed again by a washing step. A chromogenic substrate, TMB (3,3',5,5'-tetramethyl-benzidine), is added to all wells. During a 30 minutes incubation, the substrate is converted to a colored end product (blue) by the bound enzyme. Enzyme reaction is stopped by dispensing hydrochloric acid as stop solution (change from blue to yellow). The color intensity is indirect proportional to the concentration of camel progesterone present in the sample. The Optical Density (OD) of the color solution is measured with a microtiter plate reader at 450 nm. A calibrator curve is constructed by plotting OD values against concentrations of calibrators, and concentrations of unknown samples are determined using this calibrator curve.

Product features:
The kit contains reagents for 96 determinations;
Microtiter plate consisting of 12x8;
Microtiter plate reader at 450 nm;
Analytical sensitivity: 0,13 ng/mL.