2.3. Design and construction of the immunochromatographic strip tests
The immunochromatographic strip tests were modified from the design
of Liu et al. [30] as shown in Fig. 1. The conjugate pad was from a
glass fiber-filter and prepared by carefully dropping off 2 μl of 5% HRPconjugated
antibody of melamine (HRP-ab) in 0.02 M PBS pH 7.0.
After drying at room temperature, the procedure was repeated for 2
times. The immunochromatographic reaction path and the test zone were from the nitrocellulose (NC) membrane with the distance arranged
at ~5.0 cm between the conjugate pad and the test zone. Meanwhile,
the test zone was prepared with the same method of the
conjugate pad using 2 μl of HRP-ab. The sample application pad was
pasted with one end overlapped to the NC membrane and the other
end was pasted to the absorbent pad.