Development of Flow Injection Spectrofluorimetric Detection System for the Determination of Homocysteine

In this work, a new simple and sensitive flow injection method is developed for the determination of homocysteine with spectrofluorimetric detection technique. This method is based on the oxidation of homocysteine with Tl (III) in acidic media, producing fluorescence reagent, TlCl32- (lambda(ex)=237 nm, lambda(em)=419 nm). The effects of chemical parameters (including pH of the solutions, the buffer, Tl (III) and potassium chloride concentrations), instrumental parameters (such as flow rate of the solutions, reaction coil length, and sample loop volume) and temperature on the fluorescence intensity as an analytical signal are studied and optimized. In the optimum conditions of the above variables, homocysteine can be determined in the range 4.0x10(-7)-40.0x10(-6) M with the LDR from 4.0x10(-7) to 25.0x10(-6) M. The detection limit (with S/N=3) is 6.0x10(-8) M of homocysteine and precision for the injection of 5.0, 10.0 and 15.0 mu M of homocysteine are 0.8%, 1.5% and 2.5% (n=10) respectively. The rate of analysis is 90 samples per hour. The influence of potential interfering substances, including amino acids and carbohydrates is also studied. The proposed method has been successfully used for the determination of homocysteine in the real sample (blood serum and tap water) matrix.