A rapid hydrolysis method and DABS-Cl derivatization for complete amino acid analysis of octreotide acetate by reversed phase HPLC.

Octreotide as a synthetic cyclic octapeptide is a somatostatin analog with longer half-life and more selectivity for inhibition of the growth hormone. The acetate salt of octreotide is currently used for medical treatment of somatostatin-related disorders such as endocrine and carcinoid tumors, acromegaly, and gigantism. Octreotide contains both cysteine and tryptophan residues which make the hydrolysis part of its amino acid analysis procedure very challenging. The current paper introduces a fast and additive-free method which preserves tryptophan and cysteine residues during the hydrolysis. Using only 6 M HCl, this hydrolysis process is completed in 30 min at 150 °C. This fast hydrolysis method followed by pre-column derivatization of the released amino acids with 4-N,N-dimethylaminoazobenzene-4'-sulfonyl chloride (DABS-Cl) which takes only 20 min, makes it possible to do the complete amino acid analysis of an octreotide sample in a few hours. The highly stable-colored DABS-Cl derivatives can be detected in 436 nm in a reversed phase chromatographic system, which eliminates spectral interferences to a great extent. The amino acid analysis of octreotide acetate including hydrolysis, derivatization, and reversed phase HPLC determination was validated according to International Conference of Harmonization (ICH) guidelines.

Nucleic acid based fluorescent nanothermometers.

Accurate thermometry at micro- and nanoscales is essential in many nanobiotechnological applications. The nanothermometers introduced in this paper are composed of labeled molecular beacons (MBs) comprising gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) on which, depending on application, many MBs of one or more types are immobilized. In this design, three differently labeled MBs with different thermostabilities function as the sensing elements, and AuNPs act as carriers of the MBs and also quenchers of their fluorophores. This flexible design results in a number of nanothermometers with various temperature-sensing ranges. At the lowest temperature, the MBs are in the closed form, where they are quenched. By increasing the temperature, the MBs start to open with respect to their melting points (Tm), and as a result, the fluorescence emission will increase. The temperature resolution of the nanoprobes over a range of 15-60 °C is less than 0.50 °C, which indicates their high sensitivity. Such a good temperature resolution is a result of the specific design of the unusual less stable MBs and also presence of many MBs on AuNPs. The reproducibility and precision of the probes are also satisfactory. The multiplex MB nanoprobe is suitable for thermal imaging by fluorescence microscopy.

Multiway investigation of interaction between fluorescence labeled DNA strands and unmodified gold nanoparticles.

The single stranded DNA can be adsorbed on the negatively charged surface of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), but the rigid structure of double stranded DNA prevents it from adsorption. Signal of a tagged single stranded DNA will be quenched by the plasmon effect of the AuNP surface after its adsorption. This phenomenon has been used to study the DNA hybridization and interactions of two complementary 21mer oligonucleotides each tagged with a different fluorescent dye in the presence of 13 nm gold nanoparticles. The DNA strands used in this study belong to the genome of HIV. The obtained rank deficient three-way fluorescence data sets were resolved by both PARAFAC and restricted Tucker3 models. This is the first successful application of a multiway chemometric technique to analyze multidimensional nanobiological data. The restricted Tucker3 showed a better performance compared to PARAFAC in resolving the data sets. The advantages of restricted Tucker3 analysis over the unrestricted one, i.e., the limited rotational freedom (more unique results) and better interpretability of the obtained results, were experienced in this study. The resolved excitation, emission, and concentration profiles and specially fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) profiles obtained by restricted Tucker3 were chemically more meaningful than those obtained from PARAFAC.

Tucker core consistency for validation of restricted Tucker3 models.

In Tucker3 analysis of three-way data array obtained from a chemical or biological system, it is sometimes possible to use a priori knowledge about the system to specify what is called a restricted Tucker3 model. Often, the restricted Tucker3 model is characterized by having some elements of the core forced to zero. As a simple example, an F-component PARAFAC model can be seen as a restricted (F, F, F) Tucker3 model in which only superdiagonal elements of the core are allowed to be nonzero. The core consistency diagnostic was previously introduced by Bro and Kiers for determining the proper number of components in PARAFAC analysis. In the current study, this diagnostic is extended to other restricted Tucker3 models to validate the appropriateness of the applied constraints. The new diagnostic is named Tucker core consistency (TuckCorCon). When the dimensionality and the pattern of the restricted core is valid, the simple core of restricted Tucker3 model and a corresponding unrestricted core will be similar and in this case the TuckCorCon will be close to maximum (100%). A simulated chemical equilibrium data set and two experimental data sets were used to evaluate the applicability of the TuckCorCon to decide about the appropriateness of dimensionality and pattern of the core nonzero elements in the restricted Tucker3 models.