Compounds having a mercapto group (thiol) widely exist in animals, plants and microorganisms, and are well known to play important roles in biological and pharmaceutical process, e.g., acting as a detoxication agent, a protection agent and so on. Hence, various drugs contain naturally occurring thiols for the above-described purpose. Methods for analyzing these thiols include titrimetry, 1 spectrophotometry, 2-8 spectrofluorometry, 9 electroanalysis, 10 mass spectrometry, 11 nuclear magnetic resonance, 12 gas chromatography, 13 liquid chromatography, [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] and radio-immuno-assay procedures. 21 Metal ions, especially soft metals, such as copper, silver, mercury and palladium, have a high affinity for -SH groups in organic ligands. We have already reported on fluorophotometric determinations of sulfide ion 22 and penicillins 23 with fluorescein-mercury compounds, and on spectrophotometric determinations of thiourea 24 and β-lactam compounds 25 with palladium(II) and a dye. However, the former method, based on mercury, has a limit for its possible toxicity, and the latter method, based on palladium, has a problem concerning the influences of foreign substances. On the other hand, we have reported on simple and highly spectrophotometric determinations of adenine 26 and silver(I) 27 based on the ternary complex formation of eosin-silver(I)-adenine. In this reaction system, we noticed that the analytical values of adenine or silver(I) were severely interfered with by small amounts of thiols, and were only little interfered with by almost other coexisting substances. We speculated that a method which would utilize the fading of a eosin-silver(I)-adenine ternary complex in the presence of a thiol would serve as a simple and highly sensitive determination of thiols. Here, we report on a spectrophotometric method for the determination of biologically active thiols based on the fading of a eosinsilver(I)-adenine complex in the presence of thiols.
Experimental
Reagents and solutions6-Mercaptopurine (MP) and other thiols, analytical-grade reagents, were purchased from Wako Pure Chemical Co., Ltd., Sigma Chemical Co., Nacalai Tesque Inc., and Kishida Chemical Co., Ltd., and used without further purification. The stock and working solutions of other thiols were freshly prepared every week. A stock solution of silver(I) (1.0 × 10 -2 M, 1 M = 1 mol dm -3 ) was prepared by dissolving 108 mg of metallic silver (99.99%, Mitsuwa Chemicals) in 2 ml of 60% nitric acid by heating; this solution was diluted to 100 ml with water. The working solution (2.0 × 10 -4 M) was made by suitable dilution of this stock solution, as required. An adenine solution (2.0 × 10 -3 M) was prepared by dissolving a proper quantity of adenine (Sigma Chemical Co.) in 2 ml of 10% sulfuric acid and diluting the mixture to 100 ml with water. A solution (1.0 × 10 -3 M) of eosin was prepared by dissolving eosin (Wako Pure Chemical Co., Ltd.) in water. A solution of poly(N-vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP, K-90, Kishida Chemical Co., Ltd.) was prepared...