The potential of supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) as a preparation method for mass spectrometry of dried blood spots (DBS) was examined. SFE is generally used for the extraction of hydrophobic compounds, but hydrophilic metabolites such as amino acids, amines, and nucleic-acid-related metabolites could be extracted by adding a low level of methanol as a modifier. Under the optimized conditions, over 200 metabolites were detected from a dried serum spot, of which over 160 metabolites could be analyzed stably (RSD <20%). These results show that SFE is an effective extraction method of metabolites with a wide range of polarity in DBS.
Keywords: Dried blood spot (DBS); Mass spectrometry (MS); Metabolite; Metabolome analysis; Supercritical fluid extraction (SFE).
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