Determination of sarcosine as possible tumour marker of prostate tumours

Amino acid sarcosine, known also as N-methylglycine, may beestablished as new very important marker in prostate malignant tumours and may be determined by very simple test. Cancer of prostate is one of the most incident types of malignant tumours in men. More than one thousand men in Czech Republic die due to this disease. As well as in the case of other malignant tumours, for initiation of treatment well timed diagnosis of disease is necessary. For determination of sarcosine we employed the ionex chromatography with postcolumn derivatization by ninhydrin. We achieved the calibration curve linearity R2=0.9984 with limit of detection 500nM. Moreover we confirmed that the calibration was not affected by presence of another aminoacids and ensure thatselectivity of separation is near to 99% efficiency.