Capillary electrophoretic analysis of ionic content in exhaled breath condensate and pH monitoring as a non-invasive method in gastroesophageal reflux disease diagnostics

Utilizing a nanocomposite aerogel grafted with Fe3O4@GO for the extraction and determination of metoprolol in exhaled breath condensate

This article presents a solid-phase extraction method combined with a spectrofluorometric method for the extraction/pre-concentration and determination of metoprolol (MET) in exhaled breath condensate. The extraction sorbent is an agarose aerogel nanocomposite grafted with graphene oxide (GO) Fe3O4. The size and morphology of the nanosorbent were characterized via X-ray crystallography, scanning electron microscopy, Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry, and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller analysis. Factors affecting the extraction/determination of MET were optimized using the one-at-a-time method. Under optimized experimental conditions, the calibration graph was linear in the range of 0.005 to 2.0 μg mL-1 with a detection limit of 0.001 μg mL-1. The method was successfully applied for the determination of MET in biological samples taken from patients receiving MET.

Breathomics: Review of Sample Collection and Analysis, Data Modeling and Clinical Applications

Metabolomics research is rapidly gaining momentum in disease diagnosis, on top of other Omics technologies. Breathomics, as a branch of metabolomics is developing in various frontiers, for early and noninvasive monitoring of disease. This review starts with a brief introduction to metabolomics and breathomics. A number of important technical issues in exhaled breath collection and factors affecting the sampling procedures are presented. We review the recent progress in metabolomics approaches and a summary of their applications on the respiratory and non-respiratory diseases investigated by breath analysis. Recent reports on breathomics studies retrieved from Scopus and Pubmed were reviewed in this work. We conclude that analyzing breath metabolites (both volatile and nonvolatile) is valuable in disease diagnoses, and therefore believe that breathomics will turn into a promising noninvasive discipline in biomarker discovery and early disease detection in personalized medicine. The problem of wide variations in the reported metabolite concentrations from breathomics studies should be tackled by developing more accurate analytical methods and sophisticated numerical analytical alogorithms.

Simultaneous capillary electrophoresis of anions and cations in a single injection using an anion exchanger-modified capillary for determination of salivary ions in combination with statistical analyses

This paper describes the simultaneous capillary electrophoresis (CE) of anions and cations using an anion exchange-modified capillary, which was prepared by chemical coating with a cationic silylating reagent, and its application to saliva analysis. The CE method provides high-throughput (5 min for a single sample injection) analysis by generating a high-velocity electroosmotic flow at pH 3.0-3.5. The detection limits at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3 ranged from 1.2 to 18 μM for anions and 1.0 to 2.7 μM for cations. The relative standard deviations for the migration times and peak areas of analytes (n = 4) ranged from 0.05% to 0.40% and 0.94% to 4.7%, respectively. The CE system was used to analyze 11 common ions in saliva samples collected from long-distance runners and sedentary university students before and after running for a set distance or a set time. Interestingly, the SCN^- concentrations decreased in the saliva samples of all 14 athletes and 16 sedentary students after running. Furthermore, when the concentrations of the analyzed ions were compared with that of cortisol as a typical stress marker by multiple regression analysis, SCN^- and NO₃^- in saliva samples from the two subject groups strongly correlated with cortisol levels, as determined by an electrochemiluminescence immunoassay. This study improves our knowledge of both the analytical methodology for CE and statistical methods for identifying common ions that could be used as physical stress markers.