CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is a cofactor in the respiratory chain and a potent endogenous antioxidant. Its deficiency is implicated in mitochondrial and muscular diseases, heart failure, and malignancy. CoQ10 extremely low concentration especially in pathology, the importance to determine significant changes following supplementation and the increasing demand for its measurement according to its higher use in clinical therapy, forces analytical laboratories to use simple, fast and highly sensitive methods. In this work, we developed a miniaturized HPLC-UV system for the determination CoQ10 in human plasma using an XTerra microcolumn (50 mm x 2.1 mm i.d., 3.5 µm particle size), methanol:water (98:2, v/v) as mobile phase, 275 nm, flow rate of 0.3 mL/min, 30 ºC column temperature and 2 µL injection volume. The extraction procedure consists of a plasma precipitation with 1-propanol and evaporation under nitrogen to allow a 1.5-fold enrichment. The chromatographic analysis was accomplished in 7 min. As a result, it was possible to quantitate CoQ10 in small sample volumes down to 0.07 µM and detect as low as 0.02 µM in real plasma, with good accuracy and precision, even in pathological conditions. The proposed method was found to be suitable for routine CoQ10 determination in clinical laboratories.

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