Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography–High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry and Direct Infusion–High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry for Combined Exploratory and Targeted Metabolic Profiling of Human Urine

The application of metabolic phenotyping to epidemiological studies involving thousands of biofluid samples presents a challenge for the selection of analytical platforms that meet the requirements of high-throughput precision analysis and cost-effectiveness. Here, direct infusion nanoelectrospray (DI-nESI)- was compared to an ultra-performance (UPLC)-high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) method for metabolic profiling of an exemplary set of 132 human urine samples from a large epidemiological cohort. Both methods were developed and optimised to allow simultaneous collection of high resolution urinary metabolic profiles and quantitative data for a selected panel of 35 metabolites. The total run time for measuring the sample set in both polarities by UPLC-HRMS was of 5 days compared to 9 hours by DI-nESI-HRMS. To compare the classification ability of the two MS methods we performed exploratory analysis of the full-scan HRMS profiles to detect sex-related differences in biochemical composition. Although ...