Impact of the used solvent on the reconstitution efficiency of evaporated biosamples for untargeted metabolomics studies

INTRODUCTION: Untargeted metabolomics intends to objectively analyze a wide variety of compounds. Their diverse physicochemical properties make it difficult to choose an appropriate reconstitution solvent after sample evaporation without influencing the chromatography or hamper column sorbent integrity. OBJECTIVES: The study aimed to identify the most appropriate reconstitution solvent for blood plasma samples in terms of feature recovery, four endogenous compounds, and one selected internal standard. METHODS: We investigated several reconstitution solvent mixtures containing acetonitrile and methanol to resolve human plasma extract and evaluated them concerning the peak areas of tryptophan-d(5), glucose, creatinine, palmitic acid, and the phophatidylcholine PC(P-16:0/P-16:0), as well as the total feature count RESULTS: Results indicated that acetonitrile containing 30% methanol was best suited to match all tested criteria at least for human blood plasma samples. CONCLUSION: Despite identifying the mixture of acetonitrile and methanol being suitable as solvent for human blood plasma extracts, we recommend to systematically test for an appropriate reconstitution solvent for each analyzed biomatrix. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11306-019-1631-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.