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Bovine serum albumin is a model protein which has been conventionally used as protein standard and in many areas of biochemistry, pharmacology, medicine, etc. Radioiodination procedure for bovine serum albumin employing chloramine-T as an oxidant with slight modification was evaluated critically to establish the optimal conditions for the preparation of radiolabeled tracer (125I-BSA) with required specific activity without impairing the immunoreactivity and biological activity. Optimized radioiodination procedure involving 10 µg of chloramine-T along with 20 µg of sodium metabisulphite with 60 seconds incubation at 2oC yielded 125I-BSA with high integrity.
Key words: Bovine serum albumin, chloramine-T, radiolabeled, tracer

Serum albumin is the most abundant globular protein in the plasma and synthesized by the liver using dietary proteins. The physiochemical properties and structure of serum albumin is well studied and hence it serves as a model protein for several researchers [1-3]. Radioiodinated bovine serum albumin (BSA) is used in many areas of biochemistry, pharmacology and medicine.125I-BSA has been used conventionally in the tannin precipitation studies[4]. Hence, a well standardised procedure for the preparation of radioiodinated BSA could be useful for a variety of studies involving in-vitro quantification.
Although several methods for labeling 125I are available, radioiodination employing chloramine-T method is the most common method to introduce a radioactive atom into a large biological molecule [5]. The reaction starts with radioactive iodide anion, which is then oxidized using chloramine-T to a more reactive oxidation state. This reacts principally with aromatic groups in protein mainly phenolic tyrosine. The reac...

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...ubunit structure of the protein [8]. The damage caused due to radioiodination was experimentally proved by isoelectric focusing studies [9]. When conditions for reagent concentration was optimized, ideally for every one molecule of oxidant two molecules of reductant is needed to stop the reaction. The result was consistent with the previous radioiodination techniques studied for different protein molecules. It was demonstrated that when incubation time was increased it resulted in damage to the protein. The damage might have caused probably due to increased time of exposure of active iodide species with the protein. Studies on the effect of temperature gave yield of 75% when the reaction was performed at 2oC which is supported by the conclusion that at ambient temperature labeled BSA is in an aggregated form which lowers the iodination yield at low temperature [10].

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