Capillary electrophoretic (CE) profiling analysis combined with pattern recognition methods is described for the correlation between urinary nucleoside profiles and uterine cervical cancer. Nucleosides were extracted from urine specimens by solid-phase extraction in affinity mode using phenylboronic acid gel. CE separation was carried out with an uncoated fused-silica capillary (570 mm x 50 microm I.D.) maintained at 20 degrees C, using 25 mM borate-42.5 mM phosphate buffer (pH 6.7) containing 200 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate as the run buffer under the applied voltage of 20 kV. A total of 15 nucleosides were positively identified in urine samples (2 ml) from eight uterine myoma (benign tumor group), 10 uterine cervical cancer (malignant tumor group) patients and 10 healthy females (normal group) studied. The star symbol plots drawn based on each mean concentration of nucleosides normalized to that in normal group enabled one to discriminate malignant and benign groups from normal group. In addition, canonical discriminant analysis performed on the nucleoside data of 28 individual urine specimens correctly classified into three separate clusters according to groups in the canonical plot.