Untargeted metabolomic study by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry in brain tissues on the effects of combined cocaine and ethanol self-administration in male and female young rats.

The combined use of ethanol and cocaine is frequent among drug-abuse users and leads to further exacerbation of health consequences compared to individual consumption and this is of special concern during the transition to adulthood. Despite its high prevalence, the effect of combined consumption of cocaine and ethanol has been scarcely studied. In this work, we report the first untargeted metabolomic study in brain tissues to contribute to the advancement in the knowledge of the possible neurobiological effects of this polysubstance dependence. Liquid Chromatography coupled to high resolution Mass Spectrometry was employed to analyze three different brain tissues samples, prefrontal cortex, striatum and hippocampus, from male and female young rats exposed intravenously to a self-administration of these drugs. After optimizing the best sample treatment and selecting the chromatographic and detection conditions to find the maximum number of significant features (possible biomarker metabolites), the high resolution of the Orbitrap analyzer used in this work has made it possible to find up to 761 significant features with assigned molecular formula, of which up to 190 were tentatively identified and 44 unequivocally confirmed. The results demonstrated that the altered metabolic pathways are involved in multiple functions: receptor systems, such as the Glutamine-Glutamic acid-GABA axis or the catecholamine pathway, purinergic and pyrimidine pathways, fatty acids or oxidative stress, among others.

Untargeted metabolomic analysis to explore the impact of soil amendments in a non-conventional wastewater treatment.

As non-conventional wastewater treatment, vegetation filters make the most of the natural attenuation processes that occur in soil to remove contaminants, while providing several environmental benefits. However, this practice may introduce contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and their transformation products (TPs) into the environment. A potential improvement to the system was tested using column experiments containing soil (S) and soil amended with woodchips (SW) or biochar (SB) irrigated with synthetic wastewater that included 11 selected CECs. This study evaluated: i) known CECs attenuation and ii) unknown metabolites formation. Known CECs attenuation was assessed by total mass balance by considering both water and soil media. An untargeted metabolomic strategy was developed to assess the formation of unknown metabolites and to identify them in water samples. The results indicated that SB enhanced CECs attenuation and led to the formation of fewer metabolites. Sorption and biodegradation processes were favored by the bigger surface area of particles in SB column, especially for compounds with negative charges. Incorporating woodchips into soil shortened retention times in the column, which reduced attenuation phenomena and resulted in the formation of significantly more metabolites. Incomplete biodegradation reactions, fostered by shorter retention times in SW column could mainly explain these results.

Metabolic fingerprinting of chemotherapy-resistant prostate cancer stem cells. An untargeted metabolomic approach by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Chemoresistance is one of the most important challenges in cancer therapy. The presence of cancer stem cells within the tumor may contribute to chemotherapy resistance since these cells express high levels of extrusion pumps and xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes that inactivate the therapeutic drug. Despite the recent advances in cancer cell metabolism adaptations, little is known about the metabolic adaptations of the cancer stem cells resistant to chemotherapy. In this study, we have undertaken an untargeted metabolomic analysis by liquid chromatography-high-resolution spectrometry combined with cytotoxicity assay, western blot, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), and fatty acid oxidation in a prostate cancer cell line resistant to the antiandrogen 2-hydroxiflutamide with features of cancer stem cells, compared to its parental androgen-sensitive cell line. Metabolic fingerprinting revealed 106 out of the 850 metabolites in ESI+ and 67 out of 446 in ESI- with significant differences between the sensitive and the resistant cell lines. Pathway analysis performed with the unequivocally identified metabolites, revealed changes in pathways involved in energy metabolism as well as posttranscriptional regulation. Validation by enzyme expression analysis indicated that the chemotherapy-resistant prostate cancer stem cells were metabolically dormant with decreased fatty acid oxidation, methionine metabolism and ADP-ribosylation. Our results shed light on the pathways underlying the entry of cancer cells into dormancy that might contribute to the mechanisms of drug resistance.

The effects of combined intravenous cocaine and ethanol self-administration on the behavioral and amino acid profile of young adult rats.

Under paradigms of combined intravenous cocaine and ethanol self-administration, the effects on behavior have been poorly explored. Numerous studies have found sex differences in amino acids profile and behavioral responses to each drug, yet few have focused on the interactions between cocaine and ethanol. The main objective of this work was to explore the acquisition and maintenance of intravenous self-administration behavior with a combination of cocaine and ethanol in male and female young adult rats. Likewise, the amino acids profile in blood plasma was quantified 48 hours after the last self-administration session. Male and female 52 days old Wistar rats were randomly assigned to one of 3 groups: i) saline control, ii) cocaine (1 mg/kg bodyweight/injection) and iii) cocaine and ethanol (1 mg + 133 mg/kg bodyweight/ injection). After 24 self-administration sessions carried out on a fixed-ratio-1 schedule, with a limit of 15 doses per session, 14 plasma amino acids were quantified by mean Capillary Electrophoresis technique. The curve of cocaine and ethanol combined self-administration was similar to that associated with cocaine administration alone, with females acquiring self-administration criterion before males. The self-administration of cocaine and ethanol altered the plasma concentration and relative ratios of the amino acid L-Tyrosine. In our intravenous self-administration model, females appeared more vulnerable to acquire abusive consumption of the cocaine and ethanol combination, which altered plasma L-Tyrosine levels.

Automated open-access liquid chromatography high resolution mass spectrometry to support drug discovery projects.

The need of a continuous productivity increases in medicinal chemistry laboratories of the pharmaceutical industry motivated the development, over the years, of new software solutions to enable Open-Access in many analytical techniques such as NMR or LC, among others, to characterize and assess the purity of new molecules. These approaches have been widely spread in LC with low resolution MS systems, but similar automated platforms have been rather less explored with high resolution MS. In this work, an improved Automated Open-Access methodology on an UHPLC with DAD coupled to ESI and quadrupole time-of-flight MS system is described. Detailed reports from standard UHPLC-MS runs containing chromatograms and different spectra (MS with different fragmentation) are automatically sent to the chemists. High resolution MS data is typically achieved within ± 1 mDa mass accuracy regardless of sample concentration. Upon training, chemists log-in samples into the system by selecting appropriate methods, being able to interpret the results by themselves in 95% of the cases. The instrument is working unattended, except for a limited number of samples (5%) which require more complex experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a completely automated Open-Access LC-HRMS approach has been implemented for medicinal chemists of a pharmaceutical industry.

Sheathless CE-MS based metabolic profiling of kidney tissue section samples from a mouse model of Polycystic Kidney Disease.

Capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) using a sheathless porous tip interface emerged as an attractive tool in metabolomics thanks to its numerous advantages. One of the main advantages compared to the classical co-axial sheath liquid interface is the increased sensitivity, while maintaining the inherent properties of CE, such as a high separation efficiency and low sample consumption. Specially, the ability to perform nanoliter-based injections from only a few microliters of material in the sample vial makes sheathless CE-MS a well-suited and unique approach for highly sensitive metabolic profiling of limited sample amounts. Therefore, in this work, we demonstrate the utility of sheathless CE-MS for metabolic profiling of biomass-restricted samples, namely for 20 µm-thick tissue sections of kidney from a mouse model of polycystic kidney disease (PKD). The extraction method was designed in such a way to keep a minimum sample-volume in the injection vial, thereby still allowing multiple nanoliter injections for repeatability studies. The developed strategy enabled to differentiate between different stages of PKD and as well changes in a variety of different metabolites could be annotated over experimental groups. These metabolites include carnitine, glutamine, creatine, betaine and creatinine. Overall, this study shows the utility of sheathless CE-MS for biomass-limited metabolomics studies.

Investigation on the combined effect of cocaine and ethanol administration through a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry metabolomics approach.

Alcohol is the most widely consumed legal drug, whereas cocaine is the illicit psychostimulant most commonly used in Europe. The combined use of alcohol and cocaine is frequent among drug-abuse consumers and leads to further exacerbation of health consequences compared to individual consumption. The pharmacokinetic and metabolic interactions leading to an increase in their combined toxicity still remains poorly understood. Here, the first metabolomics study of combined cocaine and ethanol chronic exposure effects is reported. A Liquid Chromatography strategy based on sample derivatization with 9-fluorenylmethyloxycarbonyl chloride and using a C18 column coupled to high resolution Mass Spectrometry (time of flight analyzer) was employed to analyze plasma from rats exposed intravenously to these drugs in a 52-min analysis. Using a combination of non-supervised and supervised multivariate analysis the metabolic differences between our experimental groups were explored and unraveled. A comparative analysis of the individual models and their variable importance in the projection values have shown that every experiment intervention includes a subset of specific metabolites. Eleven of these metabolites were annotated, where eight were unequivocally identified using standards and three were tentatively identified by matching the MS/MS spectra to libraries. The results demonstrated that the affected metabolic pathways were mainly those related to the metabolism of different amino acids.

Design of strategies to study the metabolic profile of highly polar compounds in plasma by reversed-phase liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry.

Amino acids and related compounds are paramount analytes which are involved in numerous metabolic pathways. Most of these compounds are unable to be retained on Liquid Chromatography with Reversed-Phase stationary phases due to their high hydrophilic character. An interesting strategy is to reduce their polarity through their derivatization with a labelling reagent, such as the commercially available 9-fluorenylmethyloxycarbonyl (FMOC) which forms stable complexes with primary and secondary amine moieties rapidly. Although some derivatization reagents have been employed in the study of metabolic profiles, as far as we know, FMOC has never been employed for this purpose. In this work, it is demonstrated that the use of RP-LCMS(TOF) using a C18 column and FMOC as labelling agent enables the determination of a larger number of hydrophilic compounds (proteinogenic amino acids, non-proteinogenic amino acids, and biogenic amines) when compared to the use of a fully-wettable pentafluorophenyl column in fully-aqueous conditions (gradient starting in 0% of organic solvent) and HILIC column, both without using compound derivatization. Different strategies for plasma protein elimination were also carefully evaluated. Results revealed that ultrafiltration (UF) offered a lower variability from sample to sample when compared to the protein precipitation (PP) method (from 2 to 12 times lower variability found in UF). Additionally, UF preserved a larger number of possible compounds when compared to the PP approach: 4631 unique molecular features with UF, 666 unique molecular features with PP.

Chiral separation of a basic drug with two chiral centers by electrokinetic chromatography for its pharmaceutical development.

A chiral method using capillary electrophoresis was developed for the separation of the four stereoisomers of a new chiral substance currently undergoing drug development as single enantiomer. After the selection of highly sulfated ß-CD as chiral selector, an exhaustive study on the influence of several experimental variables on the resolution was performed, being the substitution degree of the CD a very decisive factor. Run time and resolutions were about 20min and higher than 2.0, respectively. The method was validated in terms of selectivity, linearity, accuracy, precision, and limits of detection and quantitation according to the requirements of the International Conference on Harmonisation for the determination of the chiral purity of a drug substance. The usefulness of the method was demonstrated in the control of stereoisomeric impurities in raw material as well as in the determination of the chiral stability of the drug in the solid state and in dosage forms used in safety assessment. Finally, the chiral method was used to investigate the possible in vivo inversion in biological samples.

Enantioseparation of the constituents involved in the phenylalanine-tyrosine metabolic pathway by capillary electrophoresis tandem mass spectrometry.

Catecholamines dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine are well-known neurotransmitters playing different roles in the nervous and endocrine system. These compounds are biologically synthesized in the phenylalanine-tyrosine pathway which consists on the successive conversion of l-phenylalanine into l-tyrosine, l-3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (L-DOPA), dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. This work describes the development of an enantioselective CE-ESI-MS2 methodology enabling, for the first time, the simultaneous enantioseparation of all the constituents involved in the Phe-Tyr metabolic pathway, since all these compounds except dopamine are chiral. The developed method was based on the use of a dual CDs system formed by 180mM of methyl-ß-CD and 40mM of 2-hydroxypropyl-ß-CD dissolved in 2M formic acid (pH 1.2) and presented the advantage of avoiding the use of any time-consuming labelling procedure. LODs ranged from 40 to 150nM and the unequivocal identification of the compounds investigated was achieved through their MS2 spectra. The applicability of this methodology to the analysis of biological samples (rat plasma) was also demonstrated.

Improving the sensitivity in chiral capillary electrophoresis.

CE is known for being one of the most powerful analytical techniques when performing enantioseparations due to its numerous advantages such as excellent separation efficiency and extremely low solvents and reagents consumption, all of them derived from the capillary small dimensions. Moreover, it is worth highlighting that unlike in chromatographic techniques, in CE the chiral selector is generally within the separation medium instead of being attached to the separation column which makes the method optimization a more versatile task. Despite its numerous advantages, when using UV-Vis detection, CE lacks of sensitivity detection due to its short optical path length derived from the narrow separation capillary. This issue can be overcome by means of different approaches, either by sample treatment procedures or by in-capillary preconcentration techniques or even by employing detection systems more sensitive than UV-Vis, such as LIF or MS. The present review assembles the latest contributions regarding improvements of sensitivity in chiral CE published from June 2013 until May 2015, which follows the works included in a previous review reported by Sánchez-Hernández et al. [Electrophoresis 2014, 35, 12-27].

Development of chiral methodologies by capillary electrophoresis with ultraviolet and mass spectrometry detection for duloxetine analysis in pharmaceutical formulations.

Two chiral methodologies were developed by capillary electrophoresis (CE) with UV and mass spectrometry (MS) detection to ensure the quality control of the drug duloxetine, commercialized as a pure enantiomer. Both methods were optimized to achieve a high baseline enantioresolution (Rs>2) and an acceptable precision (RSD values <5% for instrumental repeatability and <10% for intermediate precision). In addition to allow the unequivocal identification of duloxetine enantiomers, the CE-MS method improved the sensitivity with respect to the use of CE-UV (LOD 200 ng/mL by CE-UV and 20 ng/mL by CE-MS) enabling to detect 0.02% of duloxetine enantiomeric impurity. This is the lowest LOD value ever reported for this drug, being this work the first one enabling to accomplish with the ICH guidelines requirements. The developed methods were validated and applied for the first time to the analysis of four pharmaceutical formulations. The content of R-duloxetine in all these samples was below the detection limit and the amount of S-duloxetine was in good agreement with the labeled content, obtaining results by the two methods that did not differ significantly (p-values >0.05).

Investigation on the enantioseparation of duloxetine by capillary electrophoresis, NMR, and mass spectrometry.

The enantiomeric separation of the antidepressant drug duloxetine was investigated by CE using 15 neutral CDs as chiral selectors. Among them, (2-hydroxypropyl)-ß-CD and methyl-γ-CD gave rise to the highest enantioresolution. The enantiomer migration order for duloxetine was found to be reversed depending on the CD employed: R-duloxetine was the first-migrating enantiomer for (2-hydroxypropyl)-ß-CD while it was the second-migrating enantiomer for methyl-γ-CD. NMR and MS experiments were performed in order to justify this behavior. Although the elucidation of the structure of the enantiomer-CD complexes was not possible, their averaged stoichiometry was studied and their apparent and averaged equilibrium constants were calculated. The results obtained showed that the chiral separation of duloxetine by CE depends not only on the thermodynamic stability of the enantiomer-chiral selector complexes but also on their electrophoretic mobility.

Potential of vancomycin for the enantiomeric resolution of FMOC-amino acids by capillary electrophoresis-ion-trap-mass spectrometry.

The potential of the antibiotic vancomycin (VC) as chiral selector for the enantiomeric separation of amino acids by CE-ESI-MS/MS² was investigated for the first time in this work. Derivatization of amino acids with FMOC-Cl was carried out to enable their interaction with VC as well as the formation of precursor ions with larger m/z which were employed in MS² experiments. The partial filling of a coated capillary was employed to avoid the loss in MS sensitivity originated by the introduction of VC in the ionization source. Under optimized conditions, the simultaneous enantiomeric separation and unequivocal identification of 17 amino acids (two of them being nonprotein amino acids) took place in about 20 min with LODs in the micromolar range.

New approaches in sensitive chiral CE.

CE has shown to have a big potential for chiral separations, with advantages such as high efficiency, high resolution, and low sample and reagents consumption. Nevertheless, when UV detection is employed, CE has some drawbacks, especially the low sensitivity obtained due to the short optical path length. Notwithstanding, sensitivity improvements can be achieved when different approaches are employed, such as sample treatment strategies (off-line or on-line), in-capillary sample preconcentration techniques, and/or alternative detection systems to UV-Vis (such as fluorescence, conductimetry, electrochemiluminiscence, MS, etc.). This article reviews the most recent methodological and instrumental advances reported from June 2011 to May 2013 for enhancing the sensitivity in chiral analysis by CE. The sensitivity achieved for the enantioseparated analytes and the applications carried out using the developed methodologies are also summarized.

Enantiomeric separation of free L- and D-amino acids in hydrolyzed protein fertilizers by capillary electrophoresis tandem mass spectrometry.

Two capillary electrophoresis-tandem mass spectrometry (CE-MS(2)) methods were optimized in this work using cyclodextrins (CDs) as chiral selectors in order to determine the degree of racemization of the free amino acids contained in different hydrolyzed protein fertilizers used as plant biostimulants. The methodologies developed were characterized by the specificity of MS(2) experiments enabling the identification of all protein amino acids, except for cysteine. The enantiomeric separation of up to 14 amino acids was achieved with resolutions above 1.0 and limits of detection between 0.02 and 0.8 µM. The methods were applied to the analysis of complex samples such as hydrolyzed protein fertilizers to evaluate the presence of d-amino acids after different kinds of hydrolysis treatments. The results corroborated the absence or almost negligible presence of enantiomeric conversions of the L-amino acids into D-amino acids in the case of fertilizers obtained by enzymatic hydrolysis, as well as the high racemization rate for those obtained through a chemical hydrolysis.

Chiral capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry.

Capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) is a powerful analytical tool, especially in the case of chiral separations, due to the fact that it combines the high efficiency, short analysis time, and versatility of the CE with the sensitivity, selectivity, and the capacity for the identification of unknown chiral compounds offered by MS detection. This chapter describes three methodologies enabling the chiral separation of cationic and anionic compounds using different strategies, illustrating the most employed approaches used in chiral CE-MS. The first methodology uses the partial filling technique for the enantioseparation of a cationic compound using a neutral cyclodextrin. Secondly, the enantioseparation of a cationic compound using low concentrations of a neutral cyclodextrin under acidic conditions is described. Finally, a methodology for the chiral separation of an anionic compound employing low concentrations of a native cyclodextrin under basic conditions is illustrated.

Separation of enantiomers of norephedrine by capillary electrophoresis using cyclodextrins as chiral selectors: comparative CE and NMR studies.

In this study, the enantiomer migration order (EMO) of norephedrine (NEP) in the presence of various CDs was investigated by CE. NMR and CE techniques were used to analyze the mechanism of the chiral recognition between NEP enantiomers and four CDs, i.e., native α-CD, ß-CD, heptakis(2,3-di-O-acetyl-6-O-sulfo)-ß-CD (HDAS-ß-CD), and heptakis(2,3-di-O-methyl-6-O-sulfo)-ß-CD (HDMS-ß-CD). EMO was reversed in the presence of α-CD and ß-CD, although only minor differences in the structures of the complexes formed between NEP and these CDs could be derived from rotating frame nuclear Overhauser experiments (ROESY). The complexes between the enantiomers of NEP and the sulfated CDs, HDMS-ß-CD, and HDAS-ß-CD, were substantially different. However, EMO of NEP was identical in the presence of these CDs. HDAS-ß-CD proved to be the most suitable chiral selector for the CE enantioseparation of NEP.

Evaluation of new cellulose-based chiral stationary phases Sepapak-2 and Sepapak-4 for the enantiomeric separation of pesticides by nano liquid chromatography and capillary electrochromatography.

Two novel polysaccharide-based chiral stationary phases (CSPs), known as Sepapak-2 (cellulose tris(3-chloro-4-methylphenylcarbamate)) and Sepapak-4 (cellulose tris(4-chloro-3-methylphenylcarbamate)), have been evaluated in this work for the chiral separation of a group of 16 pesticides including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. The optimization of the mobile phase employed in nano-liquid chromatography (nano-LC) enabled the chiral separation of seven pesticides on Sepapak-2 and of nine pesticides on Sepapak-4. Due to the fact that Sepapak-4 gave better results, this column was selected to compare nano-LC and capillary electrochromatography (CEC) under the same conditions that consisted in the use of a 90/9/1 (v/v/v) ACN/H2O/ammonium formate (pH 2.5) background electrolyte (BGE). As expected, both the efficiency and the chiral resolution obtained in CEC experiments were higher than in nano-LC for all the analyzed compounds. The analytical characteristics of the CEC developed methodology were evaluated in terms of linearity, LODs, LOQs, precision, selectivity, and accuracy allowing its application to the quantitation of metalaxyl and its enantiomeric impurity in a commercial fungicide product marketed as enantiomerically pure (metalaxyl-M) and in soil and tap water samples after solid phase extraction (SPE). The determined amount of metalaxyl-M was found to be a 26% above the labeled content and it contained an enantiomeric impurity of a 3.7% of S-metalaxyl was determined.

Determination of nonprotein amino acids and betaines in vegetable oils by flow injection triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry: a screening method for the detection of adulterations of olive oils.

A novel screening method using an automated flow injection electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry system is proposed for the simultaneous determination of five nonprotein amino acids (ß-alanine, alloisoleucine, ornithine, citrulline, pyroglutamic acid) and three betaines (glycine betaine, trigonelline, proline betaine) after derivatization with butanolic HCl. MS/MS experiments were carried out in a triple-quadrupole instrument using multiple reaction monitoring mode in <2 min. The proposed method provided high fingerprinting power to identify the presence of five of the studied compounds in different types of vegetable oils (soybean, sunflower, corn, olive) with LODs at parts per billion levels. The method was validated, and different mixtures of extra virgin olive oil with seed oils were analyzed, achieving the typification for the detection of adulterations in extra virgin olive oils up to 2% w/w. The nonprotein amino acid ornithine was confirmed as a marker for adulteration in the olive oils analyzed.