Boron Isotope Tag-Assisted Ultrahigh-Performance Liquid
Chromatography Coupled with High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry for
Discovery and Annotation of cis-Diol-Containing Metabolites
posted on 2021-01-26, 17:35authored byCai-Feng Xiong, Jun Ding, Quan-Fei Zhu, Ya-Li Bai, Xiao-Ming Yin, Tian-Tian Ye, Qiong-Wei Yu, Yu-Qi Feng
cis-Diol-containing
metabolites are widely distributed
in living organisms, and they participate in the regulation of various
important biological activities. The profiling of cis-diol-containing metabolites could help us in fully understanding
their functions. In this work, based on the characteristic isotope
pattern of boron, we employed a boronic acid reagent as the isotope
tag to establish a sensitive and selective liquid chromatography–high-resolution
mass spectrometry method for the screening and annotation of cis-diol-containing metabolites in biological samples. Boronic
acid reagent 2-methyl-4-phenylaminomethylphenylboronic acid was used
to label the cis-diol-containing metabolites in biological
samples to improve the selectivity and MS sensitivity of cis-diol-containing metabolites. Based on the characteristic 0.996 Da
mass difference of precursor ions and the peak intensity ratio of
1:4 originating from 10B and 11B natural isotopes,
the potential cis-diol-containing metabolites were
rapidly screened from biological samples. Potential cis-diol-containing metabolites were annotated by database searching
and analysis of fragmentation patterns obtained by multistage MS (MSn) via collision-induced dissociation. Importantly,
the cis-diol position could be readily resolved by
the MS3 spectrum. With this method, a total of 45 cis-diol-containing metabolites were discovered in rice,
including monoglycerides, polyhydroxy fatty acids, fatty alcohols,
and so forth. Furthermore, the established method showed superiority
in avoiding false-positive results in profiling cis-diol-containing metabolites.