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There is no smoke without fire...

Urine contains traces of our addictions (tobacco) and medical treatments. The central department of analysis has developed a sample preparation method, which is simple, fast, effective and uses little solvent, for the analysis of cotinine, main metabolite of nicotine and smoking biomarker, in urine. This innovative method of microextraction on compact thimbles helps both save time (five minutes of preparation compared to several hours up to a day for other methods) and reduce the amount of samples necessary for the analysis (only 250 µl of urine, i.e. 10 to 20 times less than for other methods).

The analysis of samples from volunteers (adults and children) shows a content ranging from 5 to 4500 ng [1] of cotinine per millilitre of urine with a detection limit of 0.8 ng/ml, which even allows passive smoking to be detected. This method can be applied to monitor the smoking cessation, for example.

Service central d’analyse, CNRS

[1] 1 nanogram = 1 ng = 10-9g.