The importance of cooling of urine samples for doping analysis

Storing and transporting of urine samples for doping analysis, as performed by the anti-doping organizations associated with the World Anti-Doping Agency, does not include a specific protocol for cooled transport from the place of urine sampling to the doping laboratory, although low cost cooling facilities can easily be made available. As a result, microbial and thermal degradation of the chemical substances in the urine may occur, which may lead to false negative or false positive results in the subsequent doping analysis. This scientifically and morally unacceptable practice is still maintained in spite of publications demonstrating that immediate cooling is an absolute requirement. Given the enormous societal consequences of positive tests, the lack of a controllable chain of custody during transport should be outlawed. This paper proposes a simple method, based on immediate cooling and cooled transport, which can easily be implemented in developed countries at low cost.BiotechnologyApplied Science

UHPLC-HRMS Analysis for Steroid Profiling in Serum (Steroidomics).

The extraction and untargeted UHPLC-HRMS analysis of endogenous steroids in serum samples is described in this protocol. The employed full-scan acquisition mode provides the adequate sensitivity to highlight the main endogenous steroids present in blood, including mineralocorticoids, progestogens , and androgens. Technical aspects for both chromatography and mass spectrometry are discussed in detail, together with a proposition of setup for sample sequence and data analysis. Furthermore, general comments are given to help the assessment of data quality and system performance