Determination of several sugars in serum by high-performance anion-exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection

In this paper, a sensitive, simple and direct method for simultaneous determination of glucose, ribose, isomaltose and maltose in serum sample by high-performance anion-exchange chromatography coupled with integrated pulsed amperometric detection was developed. The four target analytes were easily and completely separated on an anion-exchange column at a flow-rate of 0.25 mL/min by binary step gradient elution in about 16 min and the two eluents were deionized water and 500 mM sodium hydroxide, respectively. The separated four analytes were detected directly by using a gold electrode and quadruple-potential waveform integrated pulsed amperometry without derivatization. Under the optimized conditions, when the injection volume was 25 μL, the detection limits (signal-to-noise ratio equal to 3) for glucose, ribose, isomaltose and maltose were 0.92, 7.50, 12.9 and 10.3 ng/mL, respectively. The calibration graphs of peak area for the four analytes were linear over two to three orders of magnitude with correlation coefficients greater than 0.998. R.S.D. of peak areas of the four analytes for five determinations were no more than 5.6%. The analytical method had been applied to the determination of glucose, ribose, isomaltose and maltose in real serum samples and good results with low relative standard deviation not more than 5.3% were obtained. The accuracy of the proposed method was tested by recovery measurements on spiked samples and good recovery results (98.1-107.9%) were obtained.