| Apr 26, 2014 |
Determining steroid in blood and urine with gold nanoparticles
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(Nanowerk News) Researchers from Kharazmi University proposed a sensitive, accurate, repeatable and highly cost-effective method to measure tiny amounts of hormones in biological samples ("Au nanoparticle grafted thiol modified magnetic nanoparticle solid phase extraction coupled with high performance liquid chromatography for determination of steroid hormones in human plasma and urine").
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Steroid hormones have important effects on the health of bones, cardiovascular system, skin, and liver. Detection limit of the sorbent was calculated to be 0.05 and 0.07 ng/mL for progesterone and testosterone, respectively. Moreover, the application of this method provides data that report the amount of two hormones respectively 0.08 and 9.2 ng/mL for progesterone and 7.9 and 97.5 ng/mL for testosterone. The data is in agreement with data obtained from researchers and clinical tests.
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Common methods used in laboratories for the measurement of the two hormones are complicated, time-consuming and expensive. The measurement can be carried out in short time with desirable accuracy through the proposed method. Iron oxide nanoparticles have been used in the development of the sorbent.
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The research was carried out through the following steps. Iron oxide nanoparticles were firstly produced through chemical co-precipitation method. Then, they were modified with 3-(Trimethoxysilyl)-1-propanethiol and gold nanoparticles. The nanoparticles were used as sorbent for the extraction and pre-concentration of progesterone and testosterone hormones in the presence of a cationic surfactant. Finally, the amount of hormones absorbed by HPLC was measured.
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The optimum conditions for the performance of the sorbent were obtained by optimizing effective parameters such as pH value, concentration of the consumed nanoparticle, sample volume and other parameters.
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