Impact of capillary conditioning and background electrolyte composition on capillary electrophoresis analysis of prostate specific antigen isoforms

•Capillary electrophoresis separation of 10 prostate specific antigen peaks achieved.•Higher precision achieved by acidic instead of basic conditioning of capillaries.•Highest resolution of PSA peaks provided by background electrolyte with 3 M urea pH 8.

Glycoproteins expressed in the human body can experience modifications as result of pathological situations. Detection of those changes can be useful as disease biomarkers. As a result of these modifications, size and/or electrical charge of the glycoprotein can be altered. Migration in capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) is governed by the size to charge ratio of the analyte and therefore this separation technique can be used to monitor those modifications. At its turn, the alteration of the electrophoretical pattern of a given glycoprotein could be used as disease biomarker. To this aim, high repeatability for separation of a large number of peaks for a given glycoprotein is desirable.For prostate cancer, new markers are needed to decrease the high number of false positive results provided by the biomarkers currently used in clinics. In this sense, CZE methods for analysis of the several prostate specific antigen (PSA) peaks which this glycoprotein exhibit, called isoforms and containing one or more glycoforms, could be useful to study the PSA pattern as prostate cancer marker.In this study two complementary strategies to achieve both lot-to-lot capillary repeatability and high resolution of a large number of PSA isoforms are developed. Better performance and precision have been obtained for capillaries conditioned with HCl than for those conditioned with NaOH. Optimization of the background electrolyte (BGE) pH value to 8.0 and inclusion of 3 M urea on its composition were the two factors of highest impact for enhancing resolution of the highest number of PSA peaks. Under the optimized conditions for capillary conditioning and BGE pH and composition, long-term resolution of 10 isoforms of PSA was achieved. Inter-day (n = 3) %RSD was 0.55 for the ratio tm/tEOF, 1.15 for μeff, and 5.02 for % Acorr of the PSA peaks.