The reduced mobility of the biogenic amines: trimethylamine, putrescine, cadaverine, spermidine and spermine

Abstract

Biogenic amines are small molecules that are formed through decarboxylation of amino acids and through biosynthesis and enzymatic processes [2, 6, 16, 21, 23]. The biogenic amines of interest include amines like trimethylamine (TMA) and histamine (HIS or 2-(1Himidazol-4-yl)ethanamine), diamines like putrescine (PUT or 1,4-diaminobutane) and cadaverine (CAD or 1,5diaminopentane), triamines like spermidine (SPD or N(3-aminopropyl)butane-1,4-diamine) and tetramines like spermine (SPM or N,N′-bis(3-aminopropyl)butane-1,4diamine). Biogenic amines are essential components in living cells and play an important role in cell proliferation and differentiation. There is a fine balance between the cellular uptake of biogenic amines and their release from the cell. However, the polyamine content in intercellular fluid and in urine may increase due to the onset of pathological condition, such as hyperplastic or neoplastic growth. Thus, polyamines can be considered as markers of such conditions. For example, elevated levels of TMA, PUT and CAD were found in vaginal discharge fluid in cases of vaginal infections that included bacterial vaginosis (BV), candidiasis (yeast infection) or trichomoniasis [4, 13]. The content of biogenic amines in food products, particularly muscle food like meat, poultry or fish, increases with spoilage, or loss of freshness, of the products [3, 14]. Several analytical methods gave been used to measure the concentration of biogenic amines in food products and body fluids (vaginal discharge, urine and saliva) [1, 5, 17– 20, 24]. Most of these techniques are labor intensive, slow, costly or lack sensitivity or specificity. Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) has been used to diagnose vaginal infections or food freshness on the basis of measurement of biogenic amines, and also to demonstrate the suitability of IMS as an analytical technique for these compounds. However, the reduced mobility values reported in the literature are not consistent and differences of over 50% were found between different groups [7, 10, 12, 13, 22]. Most reported mobility measurements were carried out at a drift tube temperature of close to 200 °C, where clustering and humidity effects should be minimal, yet, as shown in Table 1, large variations were found. The present study attempts to explain the reasons for the discrepancies and report the reduced mobilities in air of the important biogenic amines TMA, PUT, CAD, SPD and SPD at a low drift tube temperature where the ion source is based on a corona discharge.