Automated method for the determination of 5'-nucleotidase in serum by continuous flow analysis

The manual method of Persijn & Van der Slik (J. Clin. Chem. Clin. Biochem. 6, 441-446 (1968): 7, 493-497 (1969); 8, 398-402 (1970) for the determination of serum 5'-nucleotidase has been adapted to the Auto-Analyzer II System. In the Auto-Analyzer II, the incubation temperature for the enzyme reactions is 37 degrees C, and the effective sample speed is 30/h, at a sample/wash ratio of 2:1. There is good agreement and correlation between the manual method and the Auto-Analyzer II method (equation of regression line: y = x + 0.6, correlation coefficient = 0.988; the normal range is 2.9-10.5 U/l for both methods). In routine use, within-run and between-day reproducibility are considerably smaller for the Auto-Analyzer II than for the manual method, especially when large numbers of samples are assayed.