Immunoassays

Abstract

The development and application of specific immunoassays is reviewed, as a complementary method to instrumental methods such as gas–liquid chromatography or high‐performance liquid chromatography. The simplicity of performing immunoassay methods, and their high detection sensitivity is traded off by the greater effort required for method development. In some (but not all) cases, immunoassay methods may be lower in precision than instrumental methods, but higher sample throughput may allow more analysis of a larger number of subsamples. The review describes the steps in the development of immunoassays for agrochemicals (including design and synthesis of haptens, conjugation to carrier proteins and enzymes, antibody production and immunoassay formats), application of immunoassays to a wide range of agrochemicals and immunoassay validation. The application of assays to food and environmental sample matrices and the need to overcome sample matrix interference is reviewed.