Determining sulfur-containing amino acids by capillary electrophoresis: a fast novel method for total homocyst(e)ine human plasma

A high-performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE) method based on laser-induced fluorescence detection is presented here. It enables the determination of sulfur-containing amino acids within 15 min. Fluorescence of sulfur-containing amino acids in plasma is linear over a range of 50-150 micromol/L for L-methionine, 5-100 micromol/L for L-homocysteine, and 50-200 micromol/L for L-cysteine. For homocysteine, we were able to detect 1 fmol injected, equivalent to a plasma concentration of 10 nmol/L. A similar sensitivity is present for cysteine, an even lower one being found for methionine. The intra- and interassay relative standard deviations are < 1%. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods are commonly employed for quantifying blood concentrations of sulfur-containing amino acids. A comparative analysis of HPCE and HPLC quantitation of homocysteine has been carried out in 61 blood samples. Plasma concentrations measured by HPCE were in good agreement with those obtained employing an HPLC-based method, a satisfactory correlation being observed between the concentrations obtained by the two methods (r= 0.9972). Thus, the HPCE-based procedure presented here for the measurement of sulfur-containing amino acids in plasma is a simple, fast, accurate, and very sensitive method, suitable for routine determinations in clinical studies.