Determination of cellular glutathione:glutathione disulfide ratio in prostate cancer cells by high performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection.

A validated method has been developed for the simultaneous measurement of reduced and oxidized glutathione in de-proteinised cellular extracts. This has been used to compare models of malignant and non-malignant human prostate cell lines. Analysis of LNCaP and DU145 cells showed a glutathione to glutathione disulfide ratio of 8:1 and 32:1 respectively, whilst the control cell line, PZ-HPV7 displayed a ratio of 93:1.

Metabolomics and protozoan parasites.

In this review, we examine the state-of-the-art technologies (gas and liquid chromatography, mass spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance, etc.) in the well-established area of metabolomics especially as they relate to protozoan parasites.

Characterisation of triacetone triperoxide (TATP) conformers using LC-NMR.

Previous studies [1,2] have reported the existence of two conformers of TATP. This study demonstrates the ability of LC-NMR to separate and characterise the individual conformers. The NMR data is consistent with the proposed structures for the two conformers.

Development of novel mass spectrometric methods for identifying HOCl-induced modifications to proteins.

Protein oxidation is thought to contribute to a number of inflammatory diseases, hence the development of sensitive and specific analytical techniques to detect oxidative PTMs (oxPTMs) in biological samples is highly desirable. Precursor ion scanning for fragment ions of oxidized amino acid residues was investigated as a label-free MS approach to mapping specific oxPTMs in a complex mixture of proteins. Using HOCl-oxidized lysozyme as a model system, it was found that the immonium ions of oxidized tyrosine and tryptophan formed in MS(2) analysis could not be used as diagnostic ions, owing to the occurrence of isobaric fragment ions from unmodified peptides.

Metabolism of 2-mercaptobenzothiazole by Rhodococcus rhodochrous.

2-Mercaptobenzothiazole, which is mainly used in the rubber industry as a vulcanization accelerator, is very toxic and is considered to be recalcitrant. We show here for the first time that it can be biotransformed and partially mineralized by a pure-culture bacterial strain of Rhodococcus rhodochrous. Three metabolites, among four detected, were identified.

Benzothiazole degradation by Rhodococcus pyridinovorans strain PA: evidence of a catechol 1,2-dioxygenase activity.

The pathway for biodegradation of benzothiazole (BT) and 2-hydroxybenzothiazole (OBT) by Rhodococcus pyridinovorans strain PA was studied in detail. The kinetics of biodegradation were monitored by in situ (1)H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in parallel with reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Successive oxidations from BT to OBT and then from OBT to dihydroxybenzothiazole were observed.