Journal of chromatography. A
-
Rapid and timely diagnosis of infectious diseases is a critical determinant of clinical outcomes and general public health. For the detection of various pathogens, microfluidics-based platforms offer many advantages, including speed, cost, portability, high throughput, and automation. ⋯ The key aspects of such technologies for the development of a fully integrated POC platform are introduced, including sample preparation, on-chip nucleic acid analysis and immunoassay, and system integration/automation. The current challenges to practical implementation of this technology are discussed together with future perspectives.
-
During the past two decades, chiral capillary electrophoresis (CE) emerged as a promising, effective and economic approach for the enantioselective determination of drugs and their metabolites in body fluids, tissues and in vitro preparations. This review discusses the principles and important aspects of CE-based chiral bioassays, provides a survey of the assays developed during the past 10 years and presents an overview of the key achievements encountered in that time period. ⋯ Chiral CE was extensively employed for research purposes to investigate the stereoselectivity associated with hydroxylation, dealkylation, carboxylation, sulfoxidation, N-oxidation and ketoreduction of drugs and metabolites. Enantioselective CE played a pivotal role in many biomedical studies, thereby providing new insights into the stereoselective metabolism of drugs in different species which might eventually lead to new strategies for optimization of pharmacotherapy in clinical practice.
-
Review
Chemical analysis and quality control of Ginkgo biloba leaves, extracts, and phytopharmaceuticals.
The chemical analysis and quality control of Ginkgo leaves, extracts, phytopharmaceuticals and some herbal supplements is comprehensively reviewed. The review is an update of a similar, earlier review in this journal [T. A. van Beek, J. ⋯ More research in this direction is clearly needed. For the analysis of Ginkgo proanthocyanidins (7%) for instance, no reliable assays are yet existing. Finally the growing literature on pharmacokinetic and fingerprinting studies of Ginkgo is briefly summarised.