Continuous glucose monitoring by means of mid-infrared transmission laser spectroscopy in vitro.

The continuous surveillance of glucose concentration reduces short-term risks and long-term complications for people with diabetes mellitus, a disorder of glucose metabolism. As a first step towards the continuous monitoring of glucose, reagent-free transmission spectroscopy in the mid-infrared region has been carried out in vitro using a quantum cascade laser and an optical silver halide fiber. A 30 µm gap in the fiber allowed for transmission spectroscopy of aqueous glucose solutions at a wavelength of 9.69 µm, which is specific to a molecular vibration of glucose. A noise-equivalent concentration as low as 4 mg/dL was achieved at an average power of 1.8 mW and an integration time of 50 s. This is among the most precise of glucose measurements using mid-infrared spectroscopy. Even with the very low average laser power of 0.07 mW the sensitivity of previous results (using a fiber optical evanescent field analysis) has been improved upon by almost one order of magnitude. Finally, the impact of potentially interfering substances such as other carbohydrates was analyzed.

Oxidative in vitro metabolism of the Alternaria toxins altenuene and isoaltenuene.

The mycotoxins altenuene (ALT) and isoaltenuene (iALT) frequently occur in food and feed items infested by fungi of the genus Alternaria, but nothing is known about their oxidative metabolism in mammals. We have therefore incubated ALT and iALT with microsomes from rat liver in the presence of a nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH)-generating system and analyzed the extracted metabolites with HPLC and GC-MS after trimethylsilylation. Both toxins formed a major metabolite, which was tentatively identified as the 8-hydroxylation product by GC-MS analysis and by its methylation by the enzyme catechol-O-methyltransferase. Three minor metabolites were tentatively identified as 10-hydroxy- and two stereoisomers of 4-hydroxy-ALT and -iALT. The same metabolic pattern was observed in microsomes from different rat strains and from pigs and humans. Moreover, incubation of ALT with rat liver slices provided evidence that the same oxidative metabolites were formed under in vivo-like conditions. Thus, ALT and iALT exhibit a considerable propensity for undergoing metabolic hydroxylation reactions, and the toxicological properties of the oxidative metabolites should now be studied.