Click here to download the Adiponectin Assay Note (PDF).
Adiponectin is an abundant protein hormone which belongs to a family of so-called adipokines. Adiponectin is expressed mostly by adipocytes and is important regulator of lipid and glucose metabolism. It is established that adiponectin is a insulin-sensitizing hormone with anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-atherogenic properties. Potential diagnostic usage of adiponectin was a subject of increasing interest in recent years. It was shown that decreased serum adiponectin concentration indicates insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Besides, hypoadiponectinemia was shown to be associated with coronary artery disease. Several authors point out that high level of circulating adiponectin reduce risk of coronary heart disease among type 2 diabetes patients and is associated with reduced risk of myocardial infarction in apparently healthy men. So, there is growing interest among medical professionals to use adiponectin for insulin resistance diagnosis and predicting of cardiovascular complications in subjects with type 2 diabetes.
Several oligomeric forms of native adiponectin circulating in the blood are described in literature: trimers (low-molecular weight form, LMW), hexamers (medium molecular weight form, MMW) and higher order multimers (high molecular weight form, HMW). Concentration of total adiponectin in the blood is about 3-30 μg/ml, whereas concentration of the closest structural homolog of adiponectin, C1q, is about 80-200 μg/ml. It is therefore of utmost importance that anti-adiponectin antibodies would have no cross-reactivity with human C1q. Some authors describe significant gender differences in adiponectin level in healthy adults and these differences are believed to contribute to discrepancies in adiponectin concentration reported by various authors. It was shown, that biologic activity of adiponectin is mediated by high-molecular weight form and, not surprisingly, it has been suggested recently that concentration of HMW form of adiponectin or ratio HMW/total adiponectin (sum of three types of oligomers) in serum correlates stronger than total adiponectin with insulin resistance and other measures of type 2 diabetes.
Advanced ImmunoChemical offers new generation of anti-human adiponectin monoclonal antibodies suitable both for research purposes (Western blotting, direct ELISA) and for the development of adiponectin-specific sandwich immunoassays.
References:
Search Adiponectin references from PubMed.