A New Artificial Urine Protocol to Better Imitate Human Urine

Abstract

Artificial urine has many advantages over human urine for research and educational purposes. By closely mimicking healthy individuals’ urine, it may also be important in discovering novel biomarkers. However, up until now, there has not been any specific protocol to prove the similarity in terms of the chemical composition at the molecular level. In this study, a new artificial urine protocol is established to mimics the urine of healthy individuals. The multi-purpose artificial urine (MP-AU) presented here is compared with two other protocols most cited in literature. Furthermore, these three protocols are also compared with samples from 28 healthy young individuals. To do so, attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) is used, according to which MP-AU shows a significantly close similarity with human urine. In formulating MP-AU, the infrared spectra of nine compounds is provided, making possible the band assignment of some absorption bands to certain compounds. Given its properties, the MP-AU protocol introduced here is both economical and practical, making it useful when designing comparative-controlled experiments.