부산대학교 도서관

Heavy industry has played pivotal role for the industry development in Korea forthe last half century and the facility requires periodic maintenance to keep consistency and stability because of harsh operating condition. However this might be carried out under oxygen depleted confined space. During the overhaul, suffocate might happen and the cause should be examined whether hypoxia is really involved. It is reported that hypoxia deaminates cytosine in DNA to uracil and then the DNA recovery system is known to be initiated. In this study, to get the information of uracil in the blood, SD (sprauge dawley) rats were exposed to the oxygen depleted confined space filled with nitrogen gas and then the blood was sampled followed by analyzed with GC-MS (gas chromatography-massspectrometry) through solvent extraction and silylation via standard addition method. The detection limit of the method for uracil was 0.01 μg/mL in water and the linearity of r2 showed better than 0.95. For all of the 7 blood samples, the concentration of uracil was from the value of less than 1.3 μg/mL for normal blood and 3.7 μg/mL through 10.1 μg/mL for the blood exposed to hypoxia condition. The concentration of uracil was found to be increased by about 9.6 times on average for 7 pairs. Additionally for the 3 cases of death assumed to be due to hypoxia in the confined space, the concentration of uracil was 21.8 μg/mL, 16.5 μg/mL and 10.0 μg/mL respectively. More sophisticated experiment should be required to confirm uracil to be used as a marker for the case of death in the oxygen depleted space because other variable could affect the concentration of uracil.