Porous membrane ultrafiltration-A novel method for enrichment of the active compounds from micro-plasma samples

To enrich the active compounds from plasma samples, a novel and simple method has been developed using a porous membrane envelope based on the ultrafiltration technique combining with high-performance liquid chromatography. The ultrafiltration device is a sealed porous membrane envelope prepared with a polypropylene sheet to effectively separate the active small molecules and large biomolecules, and a sample carrier is held inside the envelope to load plasma samples. The enrichment of hyperoside and isoquercitrin from rat plasma was used as an example. Significant factors of this method, such as membrane types, the desorption solvent, and the desorption time were optimized for the ultrafiltration method. Under the optimal conditions, correlation coefficients of 0.999 and 0.998 were obtained for hyperoside and isoquercitrin, respectively, with a linear range between 0.5 and 100μg/mL. The absolute extraction recoveries from 83.2% to 86.8% were achieved. The detection limits of the method for hyperoside and isoquercitrin were 0.22 and 0.20μg/mL, respectively. Compared with protein precipitation, solid-phase extraction and commercial ultrafiltration membrane methods, our proposed method demonstrates lower detection limits and lower cost for extraction. Also, it consumes less plasma samples and is found to be applicable to biological samples.