Clinical Chemistry, Vol 27, 1460-1462, Copyright © 1981 by American Association for Clinical Chemistry

Enzyme immunoassay of gentamicin with use of a centrifugal analyzer

MA Pesce and SH Bodourian

Gentamicin was determined in serum by the homogeneous enzyme immunoassay system (EMIT) adapted to the Multistat centrifugal analyzer. The standard curve can be extended to 16 mg/L; however, poor precision is obtained at concentrations greater than 10 mg/L because a small difference in change in absorbance there will produce a significant variation in gentamicin concentration. For example, the within-run precision of the method (CV) was 3.4% for a 5.0 mg/L sample (range 4.6--5.4 mg/L) and 11.1% for a 12.2 mg/L sample (range 10.4-- 15.4 mg/L). We recommend that all samples containing gentamicin at concentrations exceeding 10 mg/L be diluted with Tris buffer. Recovery of gentamicin added to four serum specimens averaged 102%. There is no interference from bilirubin at concentrations up to 200 mg/L or from moderately lipemic samples. Hemoglobin in serum in excess of 625 mg/L results in lower gentamicin values. Gentamicin is stable for six days in serum stored at 23, 4, or -20 degrees C. Comparison of gentamicin results by the proposed method with those by a manual EMIT procedure, and with those by a homogeneous fluorescence immunoassay method gave correlation coefficients of 0.986 and 0.947.