This precise description of the composition of preterm and term milk, regarding the main nutritional and immunologic proteins, confirms the influence of both prematurity and parity on milk components and demonstrates the combined effect of these two conditions.

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Polyfunctional hydrophilic microspheres of 125-nm diameter can be produced by copolymerization of acrylic monomers. Purified c-reactive protein (CRP) was covalently bound to these new micropheres, and the conjugate obtained was used as reagent in a microparticle-enhanced nephelometric immunoassay for human CRP. This assay was based on the measure, with a specially designed nephelometer, of the light scattered by aggregates formed during the immunoagglutination of the conjugate with anti-CRP antiserum. Sensitive inhibition of this agglutination by free CRP (6 ng/ml) allowed CRP quantitation in highly diluted serum samples (1/500-1/2,000), excluding any interference or sample pretreatment. The CRP assay was easy to perform (no washing or phase separation), reliable (coefficients of variation ranged from 1.3% to 9.3% for within-run and between-run determinations), and accurate (mean percentage of recovery: 104%; correlation coefficients with accepted analytical methods greater than or equal to 0.97) over a large range of concentrations. The inhibition mode excluded errors in the antigen excess zone and provided total security at high concentrations.