A micro trapping system coupled with a high performance liquid chromatography procedure for methylamine determination in both tissue and cigarette smoke

Both endogenous and exogenous methylamine have been found to be involved in many human disorders. The quantitative assessment of methylamine has drawn considerable interest in recent years. Although there have been many papers about the determination of methylamine, only a few of them involved cigarette smoke or mammalian tissue analysis. The major hurdles of the determination of methylamine are the collection of methylamine from samples and the differentiation of methylamine from the background compounds, e.g., biogenic amines. We have solved this problem using a micro trapping system coupled with an HPLC procedure. The interference from other biogenic amines has been avoided. The high selectivity of this method was achieved using four techniques: distillation, trapping, HPLC separation and selective detection. The chromatograms of both mouse tissues and cigarette smoke are simple, with only a few peaks. The method is easy and efficient and it has been validated and applied to the determination of methylamine in tissues of normal CD 1 mice and cigarette smoke. The methylamine contents were determined to be approximately 268.3 ng g−1 in the liver, 429.5 ng g−1 in the kidney and 547.4 ng g−1 in the brain respectively. The methylamine in the cigarette smoke was approximately 213 ng to 413 ng per cigarette. These results in tissues and in cigarette smoke were found to be consistent with the data in the previous literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on a method suitable for methylamine analysis in both mammalian tissue and cigarette smoke.

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► Methylamine was separated from nonvolatile biogenic amines by distillation.
► It was collected by a cold trap at −80 °C.
► The distillate was analysed by a high proficiency liquid chromatography procedure.
► High sensitivity was further guaranteed by very sensitive fluorescent detector.