Antons Podjava*, Arturs Silaks and Peteris Mekss
Catecholamine’s (CAs) and their metabolites have always attracted interest of the scientific community due to the role played by these substances in different physiological processes. As pointed by various researchers, simultaneous quantitative determination of these chemicals in different biological fluids is an efficient way of identifying various diseases. However, this challenging task can be accomplished only by using powerful and selective detection methods as well as extensive sample preparation.
To minimize the number of necessary routine steps and enable selective simultaneous isolation of CAs together with their metabolites from biological samples, the strategy for the synthesis of novel molecularly-imprinted polymeric (MIP) sorbents has been developed in our laboratory which combines “dummy” template non-covalent and semi-covalent imprinting technology to incorporate binding sites for CAs and their corresponding metabolites. As a result, both static adsorption tests and dynamic evaluation in packed HPLC microcolumns have demonstrated that newly synthesized polymers exhibit good selectivity towards aforementioned analytes which could help diminish matrix effects during bioanalytical procedures. In view of further development of a solid-phase extraction method the retention behaviour of CAs and their acidic metabolites on MIP sorbents has been studied using different HPLC conditions which helped to identify solvent systems for SPE cartridge loading, washing and elution steps.
Funding: The work has been carried out within the Latvian postdoctoral research support project 1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/224 “The development of novel solid-phase extraction sorbents for simultaneous isolation of catecholamines and their acidic metabolites from biological fluids”.
