Pretreatment of body fluids by preparative isotachophoresis prior to chromatographic analysis

This study focusses attention on the possibilities of preparative isotachophoresis (ITP) as a sample pretreatment technique prior to liquid chromatographic (HPLC) analysis. The increased demand for accurate and less time consuming analysis necessitates that sample pretreatment procedures, should be develop in parallel with other improvements (e. g. in detection and separation) which can be observed. The preparation isotachophoresis was performed on gel slabs and the zones of interest were subsequently cut out, desorbed and the desorbates analyzed by HPLC. In this study satisfactory recoveries of between 85-90% with a standard deviation of 1-5% were observed for blank experiments. For spiked serum and urine samples the recoveries in general decreased with decreasing spiked drug concentrations. These observations are discussed in this paper.