Simultaneous photometric determination of albumin and total protein in animal blood plasma employing a multicommutated flow system to carried out on line dilution and reagents solutions handling

Abstract

An automatic flow procedure for the simultaneous determination of albumin and total protein in blood plasma samples is proposed. The flow network comprised a set of three-way solenoid valves assembled to implement the multicommutation. The flow set up was controlled by means of a computer equipped with an electronic interface card which running a software wrote in quickbasic 4.5 performed on line programmed dilution to allow the determination of both albumin and total protein in blood plasma. The photometric methods based on Bromocresol Green and Biuret reagents were selected for determination of albumin and total protein, respectively. Two LEDs based photometers coupled together the flow cells were employed as detector. After the adjustment of the operational parameters the proposed system presented the following features: an analytical throughput of 45 sample processing per hour for two analytes; relative standard deviations of 1.5 and 0.8% ( n=10) for a typical sample presenting 34 g l −1 albumin and 90 g l −1 total protein, respectively; linear responses ranging from 0 to 15 g l −1 albumin ( r=0.998) and total protein ( r=0.999); sample and reagents consumption, 140 μl serum solution, 0.015 mg VBC and 0.432 mg CuSO 4 per determination, respectively. Applying the paired t-test between results obtained using the proposed system and reference methods no significant difference at 95 and 90% confidence level for albumin and total protein, respectively, were observed.