Method of Detecting Heroin and Its Metabolites
(these pages created by Stephen Popielarski and Marci Pezzuto, 1998)
General Introduction
Possession and use of many drugs, including heroin, is illegal throughout most of Europe, the USA, and many other countries around the world. As such, the need to detect and identify heroin is frequently encountered, in both its particulate form, and as metabolites in biological fluids.
Currently, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the USA accepts 0.1mg mL-1 morphine as a positive result in urine analysis, indicating that the person has used/taken morphine in the recent past. It is believed that this value could be lowered to 0.05mg mL-1. However, the detection limits of the most widely employed urine screening methods do not reach these minimum levels. The NIDA and other agencies around the world desire a more sensitive test, one that could detect lower levels of heroin and morphine.
The approach to detection I will describe throughout the remainder of this page utilizes immobilized enzymes that react with heroin and morphine.
Most of the information contained in these pages was found in: Peter-John Holt et al., Bioluminescent Assay for Heroin and Its Metabolites, Anal. Chem. 1996, 68, 1877-1882.
Why do you keep mentioning heroin and morphine together? How are they related?
How can this chemical relationship be exploited to test for the presence of these opiates?
Has anyone tried this before? What's different this time?
How is the test actually conducted? How long does it take?
Are the results from this new test in accordance with conventional test results?
What are the results from tests involving immobilized enzymes?
What problems might stand in the way of this technology becoming a product?
Thus, the high specificity and sensitivity of the luminescent enzyme method shows excellent potential for the future development of a heroin biosensor.
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