Quantification of Volatiles in Mammalian Urine by Stir Bar Sorptive Extraction (SBSE) Techniques and Gas Chromatography

Stir Bar Sorptive Extraction (SBSE) has been found as a successful extraction method for profiling volatile and semivolatile putative chemosignaling compounds in hamster and mouse urine. When combined with an automated thermal desorption system (TDSA) for the gas chromatographic analyses, SBSE has proven to be highly reproducible in quantitative comparisons of the urinary profiles. Relative standard deviations (RSD) of 1-5 % were achieved for a wide range of compounds in undiluted male hamster urine without using an internal standard. Hydrophilicity/hydrophobicity did not affect reproducibility of extraction. Quantitative estimation with selected standard compounds was also made. The effect of sample dilution prior to extraction was demonstrated with sulfur compounds extracted from male mouse urine.