Assisted reproduction is a quickly developing field of reproductive medicine whose importance is growing every year due to the increasing number of patients suffering from infertility. As a result, there is a need for the continuous development and/or improvement of assisted reproductive technologies. This paper presents a new method for the in vitro measurement of the amino acid turnover of developing embryos based on capillary electrophoresis with light-emitting diode-induced fluorescence detection. Amino acids were derivatized with naphthalene-2,3-dicarboxaldehyde/NaCN, and the resulting fluorescent derivatives were baseline resolved within 25 min in a background electrolyte comprised of 50 mM sodium tetraborate, 73 mM sodium dodecyl sulphate, 5 mM sodium deoxycholate and 2.5 mM (2-hydroxypropyl)-β-cyclodextrin (pH ≈ 9.3). The migration time and the peak area repeatability (n = 10) were below 0.5 and 4.3%, respectively. The limits of detection ranged from 12.6 nM (histidine) to 39.3 nM (taurine). The developed method, which only requires 2 μL of raw sample, was successfully applied for determining the metabolic activity of human embryos exposed to different environmental stress conditions.

• MeSH
• Amino Acids * analysis   metabolism   MeSH
• Reproductive Techniques, Assisted MeSH
• Electrophoresis, Capillary methods   MeSH
• Embryo, Mammalian metabolism   MeSH
• Spectrometry, Fluorescence methods   MeSH
• Culture Media analysis   chemistry   metabolism   MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Naphthalenes chemistry   MeSH
• Reproducibility of Results MeSH
• Check Tag
• Humans MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH