Assay of total homocysteine and other thiols by capillary electrophoresis and laser-induced fluorescence detection. II. Pre-analytical and analytical conditions.

In recent papers, we presented a new analytical method for thiol quantification in serum. This method was developed with capillary electrophoresis (CE) and laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) to analyze thiol-iodoacetamidofluoresceine (IAF) derivatives. Quantitative results for homocysteine, glutathione, cysteinylglycine, and cysteine were presented (Caussé E., et al., Clin. Chem. 45 (1999) 412). An exhaustive comparison of the quantitation of homocysteine in plasma, using high-performance liquid chromatography with either conventional fluorescence detection or fluorescence polarization immunoassay was also reported (Caussé E., et al., Electrophoresis 21 (2000) 2074). Sample preparation prior to derivatization with IAF had never been investigated. Recently we studied protein precipitation in serum with different organic agents (Caussé E., et al., J. Chromatogr. A 895 (2000) 173). In this work, we evaluated the conditions of protein precipitation in function of the amounts of acetonitrile and their influence on quantitation and quality of the electropherograms. Then, we looked at the variation of thiol concentrations in the haemolysis states and studied the thiol stability of blood samples cooled on ice.