Steroid hormones are involved in the body's metabolism, immunity, and sexual development in humans. Especially, these steroid hormones are important because they are prominent sports-doping agents. Steroids in the human body are detected for doping te...
Steroid hormones are involved in the body's metabolism, immunity, and sexual development in humans. Especially, these steroid hormones are important because they are prominent sports-doping agents. Steroids in the human body are detected for doping tests by sampling from urine, blood, and sweat, derivatization, and analysis using chromatography. In this study, a new method is proposed for analyzing steroid hormones in human sweat using the INME method. The fabricated INME needle containing a wire coated with newly synthesized adsorbent was immersed in the solution where steroid hormones were dissolved in solvent. Steroid hormones in human sweat were analyzed by direct immersion in needle microextraction (DI-INME) followed by gas chromatograph/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) using wires coated with graphene oxide (GO); polyaniline (PANI)/polydopamine (PDA). The target steroid compounds are nandrolone, β- estradiol, testosterone, and methyltestosterone. GO;PANI was electrodeposited on a stainless steel wire through cyclic voltammetry (CV) and then, PDA was coated by immersing in a weakly alkaline dopamine solution. The synthesis conditions of GO;PANI/PDA to fabricate INME-wire was successfully optimized as dopamine concentration of 3 g∙L-1, coating time of 24 h, and the length of 2 cm using response surface methodology (RSM). GO;PANI/PDA synthesized in optimized conditions was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), field emission-scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), and BET (Brunauer, Emmett, Teller) Measurement. DI-INME analysis conditions for the detection of steroid hormones were optimized as an extraction time of 56 min, desorption time of 3 min, and dichloromethane: distilled water ratio of 10:5 using RSM. The limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), dynamic range, recovery, and reproducibility were determined to validate the new method using DI-INME-GO;PANI/PDA for steroid hormones. As a result, DI- INME-GO;PANI/PDA is simple to analyze, easy to fabricate, and economically reasonable.