Mass Spectrometry

Biography

Biography: Mariane Gonçalves Santos

Abstract

Tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) have been used to treat depression disorder symptoms. Many sample preparation strategies have been used for the analysis of TCA in human plasma, however they are either poor in selectivity or require protein elimination pre-treatment. A new class of hybrid materials, called restricted access molecularly imprinted polymers (RAMIPs), seems to be an alternative to circumvent these problems. RAMIPs join good protein elimination capacity and high selectivity. Mass spectrometry (MS), equipped with electrospray ionization at atmospheric pressure and triple quadrupole, has been successfully used for polar drug identification/quantification. To combine the advantages of both RAMIPs and MS, we proposed a study that joins these properties in a single system, where we analyzed TCAs from human plasma without offline extraction or chromatographic separation. A RAMIP for amitriptyline was synthesized by the bulk method, using methacrylic acid as a functional monomer and glycidilmethacrylate as hydrophilic co-monomer.  After the epoxide rings openings, the polymer was covered with bovine serum albumin (BSA). A column filled with RAMIP-BSA was coupled to a MS/MS instrument in an online configuration, using water as loading and reconditioning mobile phase and a 0.01% acetic acid aqueous solution: acetonitrile at 30:70 as the elution mobile phase. The system was used for on-line extraction and quantization of nortriptyline, desipramine, amitriptyline, imipramine, clomipramine and clomipramine-d3 (IS) (from 15.0 to 500.0 μg L^-1) simultaneously, from human plasma samples. The correlation coefficient was higher than 0.99 for all analytes and suitable precision and accuracy were obtained.