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Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry for the Metabolomic Analysis of Urine in Colorectal Cancer

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Abstract

We report here the results of a pilot study in which ultra-high performance liquid chromatography/time-of-flight–mass spectrometry (UPLC/TOF–MS) and multivariate statistical analysis (supervised partial least squares discriminant analysis, PLS-DA) were applied for urinary metabolite profiling and data interpretation. The results of the PLS-DA indicated that the metabolic pattern as a whole was significantly different between the groups of preoperative colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, postoperative CRC patients, and healthy volunteers, respectively. The preoperative group of patients showed significantly increased levels of low-molecular weight compounds (LMC) MW 283 and MW 234 in comparison to the group of healthy volunteers group. After the operation, the levels of these two LMC significantly decreased. These preliminary results suggest that the UPLC–MS-based method coupled with pattern recognition will likely lead to procedures with the potential to be clinically applicable for the diagnosis of CRC and, consequently, to an improvement in patient prognosis.

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Acknowledgments

We also would like to express our deep and sincere gratitude to the Professor M. Michael Wolf (Boston University School of Medicine, USA) for his advice on this manuscript when he came to Shanghai. This work was financially supported by grants from the Shanghai Science and Technology Development Fund (No.05DJ14010) and the Major Basic Research Program of Shanghai (No. 07DZ19505).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Surgery, The Sixth People’s Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiaotong University, 600 Yishan Road, Shanghai, 200233, China

    Yan-Lei Ma, Huan-Long Qin, Wei-Jie Liu, Jia-Yuan Peng & Long Huang

  2. Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou, 310053, China

    Xiao-Ping Zhao

  3. Pharmaceutical Information Institute, College of Pharmaceutial Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Yi-Yu Cheng

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  1. Yan-Lei Ma
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Correspondence to Huan-Long Qin.

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Ma, YL., Qin, HL., Liu, WJ. et al. Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry for the Metabolomic Analysis of Urine in Colorectal Cancer. Dig Dis Sci 54, 2655–2662 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10620-008-0665-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10620-008-0665-4

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