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MDPI, Molecules, 8(25), p. 1862, 2020

DOI: 10.3390/molecules25081862

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Simultaneous Measurement of Urinary Trimethylamine (TMA) and Trimethylamine N-Oxide (TMAO) by Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry

Journal article published in 2020 by Xun Jia, Lucas J. Osborn ORCID, Zeneng Wang ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Trimethylamine (TMA) is a gut microbial metabolite—rendered by the enzymatic cleavage of nutrients containing a TMA moiety in their chemical structure. TMA can be oxidized as trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) catalyzed by hepatic flavin monooxygenases. Circulating TMAO has been demonstrated to portend a pro-inflammatory state, contributing to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease. Consequently, TMAO serves as an excellent candidate biomarker for a variety of chronic inflammatory disorders. The highly positive correlation between plasma TMAO and urine TMAO suggests that urine TMAO has the potential to serve as a less invasive biomarker for chronic disease compared to plasma TMAO. In this study, we validated a method to simultaneously measure urine TMA and TMAO concentrations by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC/MS). Urine TMA and TMAO can be extracted by hexane/butanol under alkaline pH and transferred to the aqueous phase following acidification for LC/MS quantitation. Importantly, during sample processing, none of the nutrients with a chemical structure containing a TMA moiety were spontaneously cleaved to yield TMA. Moreover, we demonstrated that the acidification of urine prevents an increase of TMA after prolonged storage as was observed in non-acidified urine. Finally, here we demonstrated that TMAO can spontaneously degrade to TMA at a very slow rate.