Improved analysis of vitamin D metabolites in plasma using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, and its application to cardiovascular research.

The accurate and specific measurement of vitamin D is increasingly important for determining the role of vitamin D in the pathogenesis of disease. Liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) has increasingly become the analytical modality of choice for the analysis of vitamin D. There are many advantages to using LC/MS/MS, such as high specificity and sensitivity to help distinguish the isomers of vitamin D. This rapid method, modified from a Waters Corporation application note, consists of minimal sample manipulation using liquid-liquid extraction and incorporates an internal standard. The supernatant is dried down and injected onto an ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometer. The total analysis time is 10 min per injection, enabling high throughput of samples. This method also incorporates two commercial quality control standards to provide a robust system with acceptable coefficient of variation. The analysis of control and heart failure plasma samples showed significant differences in the levels of vitamin D3 between these two groups; however, in the control group, there were individuals who were vitamin D deficient. Overall, the vitamin D3 levels were higher in control samples than in heart failure individuals. As expected, vitamin D2 levels were not observed in many of the samples analysed. This modified method is quick and incorporates an internal standard to allow for any loss in the extraction procedure. The method also includes quality control samples to enable assay standardization. The assay involves inexpensive pre-sample clean-up, aiding high throughput, which is important in many laboratories.

Assessment of reproducibility in depletion and enrichment workflows for plasma proteomics using label-free quantitative data-independent LC-MS.

Quantitation in plasma-based proteomics necessitates the reproducible removal of highly abundant proteins to enable the less abundant proteins to be visible to the mass spectrometer. We have evaluated immunodepletion (proteoprep20) and enrichment (Bio-Rad beads), as the current predominant approaches. Label-free analysis offers an opportunity to estimate the effectiveness of this approach without incorporating chemical labels. Human plasma samples were used to quantitatively assess the reproducibility of these two methods using nano-LC-data-independent acquisition MS. We have selected 18 candidate proteins and a comparison of both methodologies showed that both of the methods were reproducible and fell below 20% residual SD. With the same candidate proteins, individual inter-day variability for the samples was also processed, allowing us to monitor instrument reproducibility. Overall, a total of 131 proteins were identified by both methods with 272 proteins identified by enrichment and 200 identified by immunodepletion. Reproducibility of measurements of the amount of protein in the processed sample for individual proteins is within analytically acceptable standards for both methodologies. This enables both methods to be used for biomarker studies. However, when sample is limited, enrichment is not suitable as larger volumes (>1.0 mL) are required. In experiments where sample is not limited then a greater number of proteins can be reliably identified using enrichment.