ABSTRACT

Since the early 1930s, when Henrik Dam (1) described a compound named Koagulation Vitamin, or vitamin K (VK), which prevented hemorrhagic disease in chickens, many of its biochemical functions have been clarified, but up to now some of them are still not completely understood. The role that VK plays in blood coagulation seems more or less elucidated, but many questions re-main unanswered, as, for example, the actual role of VK in bone metabolism. Chromatography in all its variations played an important role from first puri-fication and detection of the compounds in the 1930s up to recent studies of quantitation in plasma, food, or other biological samples. The complexity of diverse matrices, combined with relative low concentrations of the vitamins in biological samples, besides the sensitivity of the molecule, makes modern chromatography essential for any analytical assay. That is the reason why sample preparation and cleanup, followed by specific chromatographic and detection methods, are common to all investigations in this field. To give an overview of running practices in pertinent literature, we will focus mainly on papers published since 1989.