Determination of creatinine and creatine by capillary electrophoresis : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Chemistry at Massey University

The assessment of creatinine and creatine in biological fluids is important in the evaluation of renal and muscular functions. For routine creatinine determinations in the clinical laboratory, the most frequently used method is the spectrophotometric one based on the Jaffé reaction. However, this reaction is not specific for creatinine. For this reason, several methods have been proposed, but the elimination of interferences in the determination of creatinine has still not been achieved in some of these methods; others solved this problem either with expensive equipment that does not suit routine analysis or necessitates time-waste procedures. In this thesis capillary electrophoresis was the new tool investigated. It was applied in an attempt to achieve both the separation of creatinine from the non-creatinine 'Jaffé- reacting' chromogens and the determination of creatine in serum. Capillary zone electrophoresis was performed with detection at wavelength 480 nm to separate creatinine from the non-creatinine 'Jaffé-reacting' chromogens in urine. The principle was based upon the different migration times due to the different molecule weights, molecular sizes and charges under the applied high voltage. The picric acid was employed as part of the running buffer to allow reaction of creatinine and picrate to take place after the sample injection. This procedure eliminated the negative influence of the reaction time that is controlled manually in the common Jaffé reaction method. Therefore, compared to the Jaffé reaction method, the new method achieved more accuracy and precision in the determination of creatinine. Determination of creatinine in serum and urine were studied at a new wavelength 417 nm, which gave a higher sensitivity of detection than at 480 nm. This wavelength shift made the determination of creatinine in serum possible by capillary zone electrophoresis without the non-creatinine 'Jaffé-reacting' chromogens interfering. In this method, serum only needed a simple filtration before the analysis. Creatine was discovered to have absorption at 417 nm in alkaline medium. Moreover, specific sample stacking was introduced in this method. The sample was dissolved in a mixture of two-volumes acetonitrile and one-volume 3 % ammonium chloride to give a 10-fold enhancement of detection sensitivity

A New Approach to Texture Analysis of Quark Mass Matrices

The triangular basis is proposed as an efficient way of analyzing general quark mass matrices. Applying the method to hermitian hierarchical matrices with five texture zeros, analytic predictions for quark mixing can be readily obtained. One unique texture pair is found most favorable with present data. Some remarks are also made concerning parallel textures between the up and down quark mass matrices with four zeros.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at PASCOS'99, Lake Tahoe, California, December 10-16, 199

Nonoblique Effects and Weak-Isospin Breaking from Extended Technicolor

Several aspects of the flavor-diagonal extended technicolor (ETC) gauge boson are reviewed. Among them are an increase of $R_b$ that could explain the LEP $R_b$ excess, a sizable, positive correction to the $\tau$ asymmetry parameter $A_{\tau}$, and a contribution to the weak-isospin breaking $\rho$ parameter that is just barely acceptable by present data.Comment: Talk given at the Top Quark Workshop, Iowa State University, May 25-26, 1995, 6 pages, use WSPRL.ST

Hierarchical Majorana Scales in the Seesaw Model

If the mixing angles in each of the seesaw sectors are all small, and the neutrino masses are hierarchical, we study the conditions for large neutrino mixing using triangular matrices. In particular, the implication of the neutrino oscillation data for the mass hierarchy in the heavy Majorana sector is examined, and the heavy Majorana scales are shown to depend sensitively on the solar mixing angle.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at PASCOS'99, Lake Tahoe, California, December 10-16, 199

Accurate and Efficient Halo-based Galaxy Clustering Modelling with Simulations

Small- and intermediate-scale galaxy clustering can be used to establish the galaxy-halo connection to study galaxy formation and evolution and to tighten constraints on cosmological parameters. With the increasing precision of galaxy clustering measurements from ongoing and forthcoming large galaxy surveys, accurate models are required to interpret the data and extract relevant information. We introduce a method based on high-resolution N-body simulations to accurately and efficiently model the galaxy two-point correlation functions (2PCFs) in projected and redshift spaces. The basic idea is to tabulate all information of haloes in the simulations necessary for computing the galaxy 2PCFs within the framework of halo occupation distribution or conditional luminosity function. It is equivalent to populating galaxies to dark matter haloes and using the mock 2PCF measurements as the model predictions. Besides the accurate 2PCF calculations, the method is also fast and therefore enables an efficient exploration of the parameter space. As an example of the method, we decompose the redshift-space galaxy 2PCF into different components based on the type of galaxy pairs and show the redshift-space distortion effect in each component. The generalizations and limitations of the method are discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Fig.2 shows a decomposition of the 3D redshift-space galaxy 2-point correlation function into contributions from different types of galaxy pair