Simultaneous isotope dilution quantification and metabolic tracing of deoxyribonucleotides by liquid chromatography high resolution mass spectrometry
Rostislav Kuskovsky, Raquel Buj, Peining Xu, Samuel Hofbauer, Mary T. Doan, Helen Jiang, Anna Bostwick, Clementina Mesaros, Katherine M. Aird and Nathaniel W. Snyder
dNTP High resolution mass spectrometry Metabolism Nucleotide
Quantification of cellular deoxyribonucleoside mono- (dNMP), di- (dNDP), triphosphates (dNTPs) and related nucleoside metabolites are difficult due to their physiochemical properties and widely varying abundance. Involvement of dNTP metabolism in cellular processes including senescence and pathophysiological processes including cancer and viral infection make dNTP metabolism an important bioanalytical target. We modified a previously developed ion pairing reversed phase chromatography-mass spectrometry method for the simultaneous quantification and 13C isotope tracing of dNTP metabolites. dNMPs, dNDPs, and dNTPs were chromatographically resolved to avoid mis-annotation of in-source fragmentation. We used commercially available 13C15N-stable isotope labeled analogs as internal standards and show that this isotope dilution approach improves analytical figures of merit. At sufficiently high mass resolution achievable on an Orbitrap mass analyzer, stable isotope resolved metabolomics allows simultaneous isotope dilution quantification and 13C isotope tracing from major substrates including 13C-glucose. As a proof of principle, we quantified dNMP, dNDP and dNTP pools from multiple cell lines. We also identified isotopologue enrichment from glucose corresponding to ribose from the pentose-phosphate pathway in dNTP metabolites.
•Deoxyribonucleoside mono-, di-, and tri-phosphates (dNTPs) are important bioanalytical targets.•LC-HRMS provides sufficient sensitivity and specificity for dNTP analysis in cellular metabolism studies.•13C and 15N labeling can be used orthogonally in dNTPs.•Simultaneous isotope dilution based quantification and isotope tracing with 13C labeled substrates is feasible.