Measurement of Pyruvate in Blood by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with Fluorescence Detection

Accurate measurement of pyruvate is particularly important in the detection of mitochondrial enzyme disorders. We describe a simple high-performance liquid chromatography assay for pyruvate with derivatization and fluorescence detection. Between-run variation is below 4.5% and the method is linear between 1 and 1200 μmol/L. The mean recovery is 101%. After sample pretreatment, the calculated pyruvate concentration proved to be stable for 15 days when samples were kept at -20°C.