Untargeted Tumor Metabolomics with Liquid Chromatography-Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Metabolomics is a powerful systems biology approach that monitors changes in biomolecule concentrations to diagnose and monitor health and disease. However, leading metabolomics technologies, such as NMR and mass spectrometry (MS), access only a small portion of the metabolome. Now an approach is presented that uses the high sensitivity and chemical specificity of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for online detection of metabolites from tumor lysates following liquid chromatography (LC). The results demonstrate that this LC-SERS approach has metabolite detection capabilities comparable to the state-of-art LC-MS but suggest a selectivity for the detection of a different subset of metabolites. Analysis of replicate LC-SERS experiments exhibit reproducible metabolite patterns that can be converted into barcodes, which can differentiate different tumor models. Our work demonstrates the potential of LC-SERS technology for metabolomics-based diagnosis and treatment of cancer.