METABOLOMIC INVESTIGATION OF COCAIN TOXICITY IN MICE, USING CAPILAR ELECTROFORESIS COUPLED TO MASS SPECTROMETRY.

Abstract

Cocaine use has been studied for decades for the damage it causes both to the person and to society. According to ONU, Brazil is the major cocaine market in South America and also has the second place in all America, only behind the US. Although, most studies about cocaine are focused in the severe binge toxicity, leaving prevalent non-abusive users out of focus to latent generated damage. I order to create a screening method covering a several substances, metabolomics enters to help toxicology with the global metabolite analysis in biofluids in order to generate a comprehensive alteration map of this toxic. Several sensitive methods are recommended in literature, but none of them are able to perform a global analysis of endogenous metabolites or, specifically, cocaine and all his five metabolites in only one analysis. Due to his high resolving power, capillary electrophoresis (CE) has gained popularity within the forensic setting. In particular, its coupling with mass spectrometry (MS) allows the analysis of virtually all classes of compounds, as recommended in studies involving complex biological samples. In this work, the metabolomic alterations caused by cocaine in several doses will be assessed in mice urine samples, using CE-MS as an analytical tool, in a systematic way.