A novel ion pairing LC/MS metabolomics protocol for study of a variety of biologically relevant polar metabolites.

We report a method of ion-pairing liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (IP-LC-MS) that we have developed for the sensitive detection and quantification of a variety of biologically relevant polar molecules. We use the ion-pairing agent diamyl ammonium to improve chromatographic resolution of polar compounds, such as nucleotide cofactors, sugar phosphates, and organic acids, that are generally poorly retained by conventional reverse phase chromatographic methods. This method showed good linearity (average R value of 0.