Determination of acrolein in serum by high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection after pre-column fluorogenic derivatization using 1,2-diamino-4,5-dimethoxybenzene.

Acrolein is a major unsaturated aldehyde that is generated during the lipid peroxidation process. The measurement of acrolein in biological samples should be useful to estimate the degree of lipid peroxidation and to evaluate the effect of hazardous properties of acrolein on human health. In this study, a highly sensitive and selective high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection method was developed for the determination of acrolein in human serum. The proposed method involves the pre-column fluorogenic derivatization of acrolein with 1,2-diamino-4,5-dimethoxybenzene (DDB) as a reagent. The fluorescent derivative of acrolein could be detected clearly without any interfering reagent blank peaks because DDB does not have intrinsic fluorescence itself, and the detection limit was 10 nM (signal-to-noise ratio = 3). The proposed method could selectively detect acrolein in human serum with a simple protein precipitation treatment.