Authors: Xiang He Marta Kozak
Publish Date: 2012/02/17
Volume: 402, Issue: 9, Pages: 3003-3010
Abstract
Liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry has become the preferred technology to measure unconjugated metanephrine and normetanephrine in plasma because of its high sensitivity and specificity over immunoassay and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry In our earlier study plasma metanephrines were extracted with offline ionpairing solidphase extraction and quantified by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry with porous graphitic carbon column based chromatography In this study we aim to automate the sample preparation with turbulent flow online extraction technology and maintain or improve the analytical performance previously achieved from the offline approach The online extraction was done with a mixedmode cation exchange turbulent flow chromatography column assisted with ionpairing reagent and porous graphitic column was used for chromatographic separation The total online extraction and analytical LC runtime was 12 min This method was linear from 63 to 4554 pg/mL for metanephrine 126 to 9545 pg/mL for normetanephrine with an accuracy of 806 to 935 and 809 to 1017 respectively The lower limit of quantitation was 63 pg/mL for metanephrine and 126 pg/mL for normetanephrine Interassay and intraassay precision for metanephrine and normetanephrine at low and high concentration levels ranged from 20 to 105 In conclusion we have developed a fast and sensitive automated online turbulent flow extraction method for the quantitative analysis of plasma metanephrines Ionpairing reagent was necessary for the success of this method
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