A sample treatment step based on solid-phase extraction (SPE) with polymeric sorbents has been developed for the simultaneous isolation and preconcentration of nucleosides and nucleobases from urine prior to analyses by CE-ESI-MS. In most reported methods nucleosides are isolated from urine by SPE in affinity mode, using an immobilized phenylboronic acid group, which specifically binds cis-diols. However, this is not applicable to non-cis-diol compounds. Here, different types of polymeric sorbents were evaluated for the simultaneous extraction of nucleosides and nucleobases from urine. The best results were obtained with Isolute ENV+, a hydroxylated styrene-divylbenzene polymer, whose retention capacity can be attributed mainly to hydrophobic interactions, and thus it can be applied to a broad range of compounds, regardless of whether they present or not to the cis-diol group in their structure. Other parameters such as the elution solvent and sample volume were optimized. We also studied the influence of the addition of isotopically labeled internal standards (ILISs) before or after the extraction step. The detection limits achieved were in the 0.04-0.17μg/mL range for a sample size of 2.0mL and relative standard deviations were 4-22%. The whole method developed, SPE prior to CE-ESI-MS, was applied to human urine samples from healthy volunteers. We conclude that SPE with polymeric sorbents prior to the electrophoretic CE-ESI-MS methodology constitutes a fast, valid and reliable approach for the simultaneously extraction of urinary nucleosides and nucleobases.
Keywords: Capillary electrophoresis; Mass spectrometry; Nucleosides; Polymeric sorbents; Solid-phase extraction; Urine.
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