Practical Clinical Chemistry: Core Concepts

This book contains a series of practical exercises to assist the novice trainee  in clinical chemistry/biochemistry learn some of the fundamental concepts and procedures. The book is meant to be used by medical residents, registrars (chemical pathology, clinical pathology), student scientists and technologists. The exercises in this book were largely developed at the University of Cape Town in the Division of Chemical Pathology with a small component from the University of Nottingham in the years 2003-2005 as a preparatory course for the Membership examination in Clinical Biochemistry of the Royal College of Pathologists. From 2006-2009, these were offered in the Division of Chemical Pathology, University of Cape Town to participants from all over South Africa (featured in the pictures). The advent of automation has meant that many laboratories in developed countries have slowly lost the capacity to provide hands-on training in some of the basic techniques in clinical chemistry. Is such training still necessary? 

In many developing countries,laboratories still rely on manual methods to perform chemistry laboratory tests. In developed countries, trainees are faced with the challenge of learning theoretical concepts from textbooks without a sound understanding of the technical concepts. The purpose of this book is to enable trainees to practise some of the techniques to assist with and provide a sound practical foundation for learning the theory of clinical chemistry. 

The ideal way to use this book is for the training supervisor or instructor to prepare the practical exercise for the trainee to perform and then guide the trainee through the correct way to carry out the exercise using the instructor’s guide and examples. The book is designed to be interactive and reader is encouraged to use the full spectrum of the available interactive features, especially those contained in the illustrations through the touch screen interface.  Comments can be addressed to the author at: practicalclinicalchemistry@gmail.com A video demonstration of the book can be viewed at:http://youtu.be/uHPeW2KbH5E

Chapter headings: 1. Basic laboratory practice: dilutions and standard curves 2. Plotting standard curves: using a dye-binding protein assay as an example 3. Basic enzyme kinetics: comparison of an endpoint and kinetic method 4. Enzyme assays: inhibition of PBG synthase by lead 5. Qualitative colour tests on urine for inborn errors of metabolism 6. Thin layer chromatography of urine and plasma for sugars 7. Method comparison exercises 8. Basic molecular biology 9. Analysis of a macroenzyme 10. Ketone interference with the Jaffe analysis of creatinine 11. Electrophoresis of serum proteins 12. Analysis of porphyrins 13. Basic concepts and practice in immunoassays 14. Radioimmunoassay 15. An interference study using food dyes and the nanodrop spectrophotometer 16. Analysis of CSF for haemoglobin and bilirubin in suspected subarachnoid haemorrhage