Polydopamine/dialdehyde starch/chitosan composite coating for in-tube solid-phase microextraction and in-situ derivation to analysis of two liver cancer biomarkers in human blood

In order to highly enrich two liver cancer biomarkers (hexanal and 2-butanone) in human blood, in this study, natural nontoxic polydopamine/dialdehyde starch/chitosan (PD/DAS/CHI) coating material was synthesized and immobilized on the inner wall of polytetrafluoro-ethlyene (PTFE) tube. It was used to develop the method based on in-tube solid-phase microextraction (IT-SPME) with in-situ derivatization (ISD) coupled to high performance liquid chromatography for the determination of the above mentioned two liver cancer biomarkers in human blood. The simple, rapid and sensitive IT-SPME-ISD method can be finished within 11 min. Under optimum conditions, the limits of detection (LODs) were 1.4 and 1.6 nmol L-1 for hexanal and 2-butanone, respectively. The relative recoveries from real human blood samples were in the range from 70% to 91% with the intra- and inter-day precisions less than 7.2%. Furthermore, this method was successfully applied for the analysis of hexanal and 2-butanone in blood samples from healthy people with 0.42 +/- 0.05 and 0.34 +/- 0.04 mu mol L-1, while liver cancer patients with 1.90 +/- 0.07 mu mol L-1 and 0.91 +/- 0.07 mu mol L-1, respectively. The t-test's results showed there is a statistically significant difference between the data from healthy persons and liver cancer patients. Hence, the developed method might be applied in the screening of suspected liver cancer patients. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.