Modern triple quadrupole mass spectrometers provide the ability to detect and quantify a large number of metabolites using tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). Liquid chromatography (LC) is advantageous, as it does not require derivatization procedures and a large diversity in physiochemical characteristics of analytes can be accommodated through a variety of column chemistries. Recently, the comprehensive optimization of LC-MS metabolomics using design of experiments (COLMeD) approach has been described and used by our group to develop robust LC-MS workflows (Rhoades and Weljie, 2016). The optimized LC-MS/MS method described here has been utilized extensively for metabolomics analysis of polar metabolites. Typically, tissue or biofluid samples are extracted using a modified Bligh-Dyer protocol (Bligh and Dyer, 1959; Tambellini et al., 2013). The protocol described herein describes this workflow using targeted polar metabolite multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) from tissues and biofluids via ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). This workflow has been utilized extensively for chronometabolic analysis (Krishnaiah et al., 2017), with applications generalized to other types of analyses as well (Sengupta et al., 2017; Sivanand et al., 2017).
Keywords: Liquid chromatography; Liquid-liquid extraction; MRM; Metabolomics; Tandem mass spectrometry; Triple quadrupole; UPLC-MS.