Literature Seminar:

Short chain fatty acid levels (SCFAs) in the gut have been demonstrated time and again to be of great importance to human health with wide ranging impacts, including correlation to depression. Detecting and quantifying SCFAs has been limited in sensitivity as well as in efficiency via the typical techniques of GC-MS, LC-MS/MS, and NMR. Often chemical modification of the SCFAs prior to analysis is required to enhance the specificity (or separation) in the complex sample matrices. Despite lengthy sample prep, most current methods do not achieve the detection limits required to use a small sample volume (< 10 μL), which is ideal for efficient high throughput analysis. Presented here is a work in which Girard’s reagent T is used to derivatize the SCFAs prior to LC-MS quantitation. The Girard’s reagent T produces a permanent cation-labeled SCFA, resulting in high linearity as well as low limits of detection (nanomolar range) for a variety of SFCAs, including the most prevalent: acetate, butyrate, and propionate. The method is several orders of magnitude lower limits of detection than other SCFA quantitation methods and was shown to be applicable to biological matrices such as cell culture media. Using the derivatization technique herein with LC-MS for high throughput analysis of SCFAs opens the door for large sample sizes (of small sample volumes) for further elucidation of SCFA relationships to depression and other diseases.