Disodium tetracarbonylferrate: a transition-metal analog of a Grignard reagent

This account describes how antibodies specific for nicotine and its metabolites and for various prostaglandins and their metabolites have been used to develop sensitive RIA's for these compounds. Thus far, antibodies have been prepared and RIA's developed for at least 100 other compounds of pharmacological importance. It has been calculated that an individual animal has the potential to produce antibodies that can recognize 107 and perhaps up to 108 diverse immunodominant moieties. Nature, therefore, has provided the pharmacologist and synthetic chemist with an analytical system of extraordinary specificity that can be adapted to the quantitative determination of a wide variety of pharmacologically active molecules. It is clear that RIA will be an important analytical tool in research as well as in the clinical laboratory