Publication details
Spectrometric and Electrochemical Analysis of Sarcosine as a Potential Prostate Carcinoma Marker
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | International Journal of Electrochemical Science |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Electrochemistry |
| Keywords | Metabolomics; Cancer marker; Ninhydrin; UV-VIS detection; Ionic separation; Electrochemical detection; Carbon porous electrode |
| Description | Sarcosine, also known as N-methylglycine, is a natural ubiquitous non/protein amino acid which occurs as intermediate and side product in glycine synthesis and degradation. Recently, sarcosine has been investigated as a new putative marker in relation to prostate cancer. Sarcosine was identified as a differential metabolite that was greatly increased during prostate cancer progression to metastasis and could be detected in urine. It was also shown, that sarcosine addition to benign prostate cell cultures caused increase of their invasivity and motility. The aim of our study was to propose a low-cost, robust and simple method suitable for sarcosine determination in biological samples such as urine or blood plasma. For this purpose an ion exchange liquid chromatography as robust separation method was tested however this method suffers from insufficient limit of detection at the level of 70 microM of sarcosine. For more sensitive detection we optimized the off-line approach to ninhydrin derivatization of collected fractions. The fractions were collected and after addition of ninhydrin incubation of the mixture under the optimised temperature and time were done. Analysis of mixture was carried out by the simple UV-VIS spectrometer. The obtained limit of detection for this optimised procedure was promising 1.7 microM of sarcosine but this value is similar to physiologically occurring concentration of sarcosine in prostate cancer patients. Therefore we optimized the electrochemical method based on analysis of collected fractions by coulometric detection integrated as FIA-ED. Here we obtained the limits of detection of 110 nM of sarcosine, which is more than satisfactory for its determination in various matrixes such as urine or plasma of cancer patients. |