Automating Urinary Free Cortisol Anaysis – New Application Note

Cortisol is released by the adrenal gland in response to stress

Paul Roberts has completed an application note describing a fully automated method for the analysis of urinary free cortisol.

Cortisol is released as part of the bodies response to stress.  Wikipedia contains a good background article on the topic.

This application note shows how it is possible to perform this analysis in a way that integrates automated sample preparation by micro-scale solid phase extraction (SPE) with analysis by LCMS.

This application has been designed to work using the same instrument configuration, that we developed for vitamin D in blood serum and immunosupressants in whole blood. This approach is revealing the extent to which a common Robotic – LCMS platform can indeed be a universal platform for clinical analysis.

Also significant, the way in which automation of the whole analytical process – including sample preparation, greatly accelerates the speed with which new analytical methods can now be developed. This whole project has lasted little more than a month.

The data produced by this new method is excellent and is documented in the application note that is available for download below.

We would welcome your opinion on this work, so please, if this is of interest to you in any way, leave your comments below.