Whereas the determination of high enantiomeric fractions (EF) of chiral compounds is very well established, the accurate determination of small deviations from racemic compositions has not yet received much attention despite its relevance to studies dealing with the origin of homochirality, where only small initial enantiomeric bias is expected. Racemic samples of representative a-amino acids w...

BACKGROUND Accumulating evidence indicates aberrant DNA methylation is involved in gastric tumourigenesis, suggesting it may be a useful clinical biomarker for the disease. The aim of this study was to consolidate and summarize published data on the potential of methylation in gastric cancer (GC) risk prediction, prognostication and prediction of treatment response. METHODS Relevant studies w...

The European research project DIFFERENCE (“Dioxins in Food and Feed – Reference methods and New Certified Reference Materials”) was focussed on the development of alternative methods for the analysis of polychlorinated dibenzodioxins (PCDDs), dibenzofurans (PCDFs) and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls (dl-PCBs) using comprehensive multi-dimensional gas chromatography (GC ́GC), gas chromatogr...

UNLABELLED Use of hormonal contraceptives (HC) may influence total plasma concentrations of vitamin D metabolites. A likely cause is an increased synthesis of vitamin D binding protein (VDBP). Discrepant results are reported on whether the use of HC affects free concentrations of vitamin D metabolites. AIM In a cross-sectional study, plasma concentrations of vitamin D metabolites, VDBP, and t...

Improving the early prediction and detection of diabetic nephropathy (DN) remains a great challenge in disease management. The aim of this study was to evaluate the early detection power of urinary vitamin D-binding protein (VDBP) for the diagnosis of DN. Urine samples were obtained from 45 healthy volunteers and 105 diabetic patients with normoalbuminuria (DM group), microalbuminuria (DN1 grou...

The biggest limitation to conventional gas chromatography (GC) is limited peak capacity, making the analysis of complex mixtures a difficult or even impossible task. Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) significantly increases peak capacity and resolution, improves sensitivity and generates structured 3D chromatograms. This is achieved by connecting two columns coated with d...

A sensitive and selective gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) method was developed and fully validated for the determination of vildagliptin (VIL) in pharmaceutical formulation. Prior to GC-MS analysis, VIL was efficiently derivatized with MSTFA/NH4I/β-mercaptoethanol at 60°C for 30 min. The obtained O-TMS derivative of VIL was detected by selected ion monitoring mode using the diagnos...

Compositional asymmetries in circular bacterial chromosomes exist on a large-scale. Using a sliding window to take the average concentration of nucleotides across a length equal to one-half of the chromosome (~2.3 million characters), it is possible to to split the E. Coli genome into two distinct region: one with a bias in C concentration and the other with a bias in G concentration. This geno...

Computational prediction of origin of replication (ORI) has been of great interest in bioinformatics and several methods including GC Skew, Z curve, auto-correlation etc. have been explored in the past. In this paper, we have extended the auto-correlation method to predict ORI location with much higher resolution for prokaryotes. The proposed complex correlation method (iCorr) converts the geno...