Quantitative speciation of selenium in human blood serum and urine with AE- RP- and AF-HPLC-ICP/MS

Abstract

Various separation modes in HPLC, such as anion exchange (AE), reversed-phase (RP), and affinity (AF) chromatography were examined for the separation of selenium species in human blood serum and urine. While RP- and AE-HPLC were mainly used for the separation of small molecular selenium species, double column AF-HPLC achieved the separation of selenoproteins in blood serum efficiently. Further, the effluent of AFHPLC was enzymatically hydrolyzed and then analyzed with RP HPLC for selenoamino acid study. The versatility of the hybrid technique makes the in-depth study of selenium species possible. For quantification, post column isotope dilution (ID) with78Se spike was performed. ORC ICP/MS (octapole reaction cell inductively coupled plasma/mass spectrometry) was used with 4 mL min-1 Hydrogen as reaction gas. In urine sample, inorganic selenium and SeCys were identified. In blood serum, selenoproteins GPx, SelP and SeAlb were detected and quantified. The concentration for GPx, SelP and SeAlb was 22.8 ± 3.4 ng g-1, 45.2 ± 1.7 ng g-1, and 16.1 ± 2.2 ng g-1, respectively when80Se/78Se was used. The sum of these selenoproteins (84.1 ± 4.4 ng g-1) agrees well with the total selenium concentration measured with the ID method of 87.0 ± 3.0 ng g-1. Enzymatic hydrolysis of each selenium proteins revealed that SeCys is the major amino acid for all three proteins and SeMet is contained in SeAlb only.