“The Theory of Everything” meets “The Imitation Game”: Quantification of amino acids, potential biomarkers of ALS, by CE-C4D with the usage of Excel VBA programming for faster data processing

Abstract

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare disease with unknown cause and no treatment or fast tests for diagnosis 1. Some amino acids are potential biomarkers of ALS, which could aid the disease diagnosis. In this work, capillary electrophoresis with C 4 D detection was used to quantify such analytes in blood plasma within a 10 min run using 3 mol/L acetic acid + 0.1% hydroxyethyl cellulose (HEC) as BGE. An Excel VBA program was developed and minimized 50 fold the time spent on statistical validation of the analytical curves.