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Three-minute method for amino acid analysis by UHPLC and high-resolution quadrupole orbitrap mass spectrometry

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Abstract

Amino acid analysis is a powerful bioanalytical technique for many biomedical research endeavors, including cancer, emergency medicine, nutrition and neuroscience research. In the present study, we present a 3 min analytical method for underivatized amino acid analysis that employs ultra high-performance liquid chromatography and high-resolution quadrupole orbitrap mass spectrometry. This method has demonstrated linearity (mM to nM range), reproducibility (intra-day <5 %, inter-day <20 %), sensitivity (low fmol) and selectivity. Here, we illustrate the rapidity and accuracy of the method through comparison with conventional liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry methods. We further demonstrate the robustness and sensitivity of this method on a diverse range of biological matrices. Using this method we were able to selectively discriminate murine pancreatic cancer cells with and without knocked down expression of hypoxia-inducible factor 1α; plasma, lymph and bronchioalveolar lavage fluid samples from control versus hemorrhaged rats; and muscle tissue samples harvested from rats subjected to both low-fat and high-fat diets. Furthermore, we were able to exploit the sensitivity of the method to detect and quantify the release of glutamate from sparsely isolated murine taste buds. Spiked in light or heavy standards (13C6-arginine, 13C6-lysine, 13C 155 N2-glutamine) or xenometabolites (5-fluorouracil) were used to determine coefficients of variation, confirm linearity of relative quantitation in four different matrices, and overcome matrix effects for absolute quantitation. The presented method enables high-throughput analysis of low-abundance samples requiring only one percent of the material extracted from 100,000 cells, 10 µl of biological fluid, or 2 mg of muscle tissue.

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Abbreviations

3AA:

Three-minute method for amino acid analysis

BALF:

Bronchioalveolar lavage fluid

CV:

Coefficient of variation

GC/MS:

Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry

HFD:

High-fat diet

HIF1α:

Hypoxia-inducible factor 1α

HILIC:

Hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography

HPLC:

High-performance liquid chromatography

LFD:

Low-fat diet

LOD:

Limit of detection

LOQ:

Limit of quantification

MAP:

Mean arterial pressure

MLD:

Mesenteric lymph diversion

MRM:

Multiple reaction monitoring

MS:

Mass spectrometry

m/z :

Mass-to-charge ratio

PCA:

Principal component analysis

PLS-DA:

Partial least-square discriminant analysis

SD:

Standard dilution

S/N:

Signal to noise ratio

T/HS:

Trauma/hemorrhagic shock

T/SS:

Trauma/sham shock

TOF:

Time of flight

UHPLC:

Ultra high-performance liquid chromatography

XIC:

Extracted ion chromatogram

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Acknowledgments

The Authors are grateful to Drs. Anthony W. Bacon, Aurelie Vandenbeuch, Bryan Bergman, Craig Jordan, Carlos M. Castorena, Gregory D. Cartee, Jeniann Yi, Hunter Moore, Sean Newsom, Agnieszka Kendrick for providing the biological samples, as detailed in the paper. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Robert Hodges for helpful discussions. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers P50GM049222, R33CA183685 and T32GM008315, and Grant #P50 GM049222 from NIGMS, NIH (CS). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Conflict of interest

All the authors disclose no conflict of interests.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center, Anschutz Medical Campus, 12801 East 17th Ave, Aurora, CO, USA

      Travis Nemkov, Angelo D’Alessandro & Kirk C. Hansen

    2. Metabolomics Core, Mass Spectrometry Shared Resource, University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA

      Angelo D’Alessandro & Kirk C. Hansen

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    1. Travis Nemkov
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    2. Angelo D’Alessandro
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    Correspondence to Kirk C. Hansen.

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    Handling Editor: D. Tsikas.

    A. D’Alessandro and T. Nemkov contributed equally and share the first authorship.

    Electronic supplementary material

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    Supplementary material 1 (XLSX 50 kb)

    Supplementary material 2 (XLSX 41 kb)

    726_2015_2019_MOESM3_ESM.tif

    Supplementary material 3 (TIFF 16061 kb). Supplementary Fig. 1 – Extracted Ion Chromatograms of amino acids. Extracted Ion Chromatograms (XIC) for 32 representative amino acids assayed in this study have been overlaid to demonstrate chromatographic separation (top). Amino acid categories are color coded as follows: aromatic (pink), acidic (red), basic (blue), neutral (yellow), imino (light blue), or other (green) amino acids. All the single XICs are presented to illustrate peak shape (bottom). Parts per million (ppm) error value windows on the intact mass needed to detect each amino acid are provided for each XIC

    726_2015_2019_MOESM4_ESM.tif

    Supplementary material 4 (TIFF 25866 kb). Supplementary Fig. 2 – Quantitative measurements of 15 representative basic, acidic, neutral and aromatic amino acid standards and relative quadratic correlations (RSQ). Extracted Ion Chromatograms for 15 representative amino acids are depicted in each panel. The inset depicts peak areas for each injection amount, with the RSQ value indicated beneath the bar graph. A mass-to-charge window used for detection is indicated next to the amino acid name to highlight high mass accuracy of the platform

    726_2015_2019_MOESM5_ESM.tif

    Supplementary material 5 (TIFF 3195 kb). Supplementary Fig. 3 – Comparability of the results obtained through the alternative methods for amino acid analysis using underivatized UHPLC/MS. Pancreatic cancer cell extracts were compared using the three min C18 method and two conventional HILIC or Amide column 15 min methods. Raw samples were either not-diluted prior to injection (ND) or injected upon a fivefold dilution. Raw values were Z-score normalized for each amino acid (intra-row) and plotted as heat maps (blue to red = one- to fivefold increase in amino acid level intra-row) using the software GENE E (Broad Institute). Consistently, undiluted samples were detected to have higher levels of amino acids through all three methods, but the C18 three min method was the one showing the average of the medians of amino acid fold changes across replicates closer to five (red columns for ND samples)

    726_2015_2019_MOESM6_ESM.tif

    Supplementary material 6 (TIFF 2867 kb). Supplementary Fig. 4 – Extracted ion chromatograms for heavy labeled 13C6-arginine and 5-fluorouracil in thirty-five different rat plasma samples. Coefficients of variation (CVs) were calculated (standard deviation/mean) to test technical reproducibility of the approach

    Supplementary material 7 (PDF 189 kb)

    Supplementary material 8 (PDF 191 kb)

    Supplementary material 9 (PDF 98 kb)

    Supplementary material 10 (PDF 215 kb)

    Supplementary material 11 (PDF 265 kb)

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    Nemkov, T., D’Alessandro, A. & Hansen, K.C. Three-minute method for amino acid analysis by UHPLC and high-resolution quadrupole orbitrap mass spectrometry. Amino Acids 47, 2345–2357 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-015-2019-9

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