Abstract
In many cases nitrosoamines (NAs) of carcinogens are generated in gastric juices and absorbed from the alimentary system; consequently, many methods to remove NAs and their precursors contained in meals mainly by adsorption have been developed. In searching for new adsorbent, a fast system of quantitative analysis is indispensable to valuate adsorption capacities of the candidates for new adsorbents. Though high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems have been used for this purpose frequently, this system requires relatively large amounts of samples and a long time to treat a separation column. In this paper we proposed utilizing capillary electrophoresis (CE) allowing quick analysis requiring only small amounts of samples. In this separation system, NAs can be detected without any derivatization, because on-column detection at short wave length can be adopted on CE with a narrow tube as a separation column. The analytical conditions for capillary electrophoretic separation of NAs were optimized with a mixture of four NAs as a model sample. As a result, these four NAs were well separated from each other with a neutral phosphate buffer containing sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as an electrophoretic solution. In this condition the calibration curves of NAs gave straight lines with good linearity of 0.9995-0.9999 as correlation coefficients.
