Hydrophilic interaction and reversed-phase ultra-performance liquid chromatography TOF-MS for metabonomic analysis of Zucker rat urine

Hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) provides a complementary technique to RP methods for the retention of polar analytes for LC-MS-based metabonomic studies. Combining the advantages of both RP and HILIC separations with the efficient and rapid separations obtained using sub-2 mu m particles via the recently introduced ultra-performance LC (UPLC) enables increased coverage of the metabolites present in biological samples to be achieved. Here an HILIC-UPLC-MS method was developed to provide metabolite profiles for urine samples obtained from male Zucker rats. The resulting data were compared with results obtained for the same samples by RP-UPLC-MS and demonstrated the complementary nature of the two separations with both methods enabling discrimination between the different sample types. Interestingly sample type differentiation was based on different markers.