Serum Taurine Measurement via HPLC

Taurine was determined using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) (Waters, Millford, MA) with precolumn derivitization using o-phthaldialdehyde (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO) and 3-mercaptopropionic acid (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO) and fluorescence detection, as previously described [13 (link)]. The coefficient of variation (CV) of the assay, computed from the measurement of duplicate aliquot pairs, was 7% [14 (link)]. As mentioned, yearly blood samples are available for > 50% of the participants. To improve the long-term reproducibility of serum taurine, we measured taurine in two yearly serum samples for the case-control sets with two or more serum donations (140 cases and 277 controls) [15 ,16 (link)].