Volani Chiara, Malfertheiner Christa, Caprioli Giulia, Fjelstrup Søren, Pramstaller Peter P, Rainer Johannes, Paglia Giuseppe
Institute for Biomedicine, Affiliated to the University of Lübeck, Eurac Research, 39100 Bolzano, Italy.
Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
Metabolites. 2023 Jan 18;13(2):146. doi: 10.3390/metabo13020146.
Volumetric absorptive microsampling (VAMS) is a recently developed sample collection method that enables single-drop blood collection in a minimally invasive manner. Blood biomolecules can then be extracted and processed for analysis using several analytical platforms. The integration of VAMS with conventional mass spectrometry (MS)-based metabolomics approaches is an attractive solution for human studies representing a less-invasive procedure compared to phlebotomy with the additional potential for remote sample collection. However, as we recently demonstrated, VAMS samples require long-term storage at -80 °C. This study investigated the stability of VAMS samples during short-term storage and compared the metabolome obtained from capillary blood collected from the fingertip to those of plasma and venous blood from 22 healthy volunteers. Our results suggest that the blood metabolome collected by VAMS samples is stable at room temperature only for up to 6 h requiring subsequent storage at -80 °C to avoid significant changes in the metabolome. We also demonstrated that capillary blood provides better coverage of the metabolome compared to plasma enabling the analysis of several intracellular metabolites presented in red blood cells. Finally, this work demonstrates that with the appropriate pre-analytical protocol capillary blood can be successfully used for untargeted metabolomics studies.
体积吸收微取样（VAMS）是一种最近开发的样本采集方法，能够以微创方式采集单滴血液。然后可以提取血液生物分子并使用多种分析平台进行处理以进行分析。将VAMS与基于传统质谱（MS）的代谢组学方法相结合，对于人体研究来说是一种有吸引力的解决方案，与静脉穿刺相比，它是一种侵入性较小的程序，并且具有远程样本采集的额外潜力。然而，正如我们最近所证明的，VAMS样本需要在-80°C下长期保存。本研究调查了VAMS样本在短期保存期间的稳定性，并比较了从22名健康志愿者的指尖采集的毛细血管血与血浆和静脉血的代谢组。我们的结果表明，VAMS样本采集的血液代谢组仅在室温下稳定6小时，之后需要在-80°C下保存以避免代谢组发生显著变化。我们还证明，与血浆相比，毛细血管血能更好地覆盖代谢组，从而能够分析红细胞中存在的几种细胞内代谢物。最后，这项工作表明，采用适当的分析前方案，毛细血管血可以成功用于非靶向代谢组学研究。
