Strategy for Comprehensive Identification of Acylcarnitines Based on Liquid Chromatography–High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry

Carnitines play important roles in fatty acid oxidation and branched chain amino acid metabolism. The disturbance of acylcarnitines is associated with occurrence and development of many diseases. Comprehensive acylcarnitine identification can greatly benefit their targeted detection, following disease differential diagnosis and possible mechanism study. In this study, we developed a novel strategy to identify as many acylcarnitines as possible based on liquid chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC–HRMS). The layer–layer progressive strategy first integrated the initial full scan MS/data-dependent MS/MS monitoring (ddMS2) acquisition and the following parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) to analyze a pooled biological sample. Also 733 possible acylcarnitines were identified containing characteristic high-resolution MS/MS features. Further, accurate mass, retention rules, and HRMS/MS information were used to define subclasses and predict undetected acylcarnitine homologues in each subclass, leading to more acylcarnitines to our newly constructed database. As a result, 758 acylcarnitines were contained in the database, having exact mass, retention time, and MS/MS information, which is the most comprehensive list of acylcarnitines reported to date. Applying this database, 241, 515, and 222 acylcarnitines were rapidly and reliably annotated in human plasma, human urine, and rat liver tissue. This novel strategy enables large-scale identification of acylcarnitines, and a similar method can also be used for identification of other metabolites.