Profiling of Amino Metabolites in Biological Samples without Protein Precipitation Using a Solid-Phase-Supported Phenyl Isothiocyanate-Based Chemoselective Probe

Amino metabolites are essential for life activities and can be used clinically as biomarkers for disease diagnosis and treatment. Solid-phase-supported chemoselective probes can simplify sample handling and enhance detection sensitivity. However, the low efficiency and complicated preparation of traditional probes limit their further application. In this work, a novel solid-phase-supported probe Fe3O4-SiO2-polymers-phenyl isothiocyanate (FSP-PITC) was developed by immobilizing phenyl isothiocyanate on magnetic beads with disulfide as an orthogonal cleavage site, which can couple amino metabolites directly regardless of whether proteins and other matrixes were removed. After purification, the targeted metabolites were released by dithiothreitol and detected by high-resolution mass spectrometry. The simplified processing steps shorten the analysis time, and the introduction of polymers results in a 100–1000-fold increase in probe capacity. With high stability and specificity, FSP-PITC pretreatment allows accurate qualitative and quantitative (R2 > 0.99) analysis, facilitating the detection of metabolites in subfemtomole quantities. Using this strategy, 4158 metabolite signals were detected in negative ion mode. Among them, 352 amino metabolites including human cells (226), serum (227), and mouse samples (274) were searched from the Human Metabolome Database. These metabolites participate in metabolic pathways of amino acids, biogenic amine, and the urea cycle. All these results indicate that FSP-PITC is a promising probe for novel metabolite discovery and high-throughput screening.