Analysis of free intracellular nucleotides using high-performance capillary electrophoresis

Abstract

High-performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE) with UV absorbance detection (254 nm) has been applied for analyzing intracellular free ribonucleotides. The nucleotide profiles obtained from peripheral blood lymphocytes differ from those obtained from Molt4 human leukemic cells. With a 140 mM borate buffer, pH 9.4, a nearly complete profile can be obtained in 25 min. HPCE has comparable resolution to that of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) but is faster in terms of time per sample run (25 min vs 45 min) and requires much less sample (nanoliter range for HPCE vs microliter range for HPLC).