Determination of urinary androgen glucuronides by capillary electrophoresis with electrospray tandem mass spectrometry

Capillary electrophoresis-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry (CE-ESI/MS/MS) is a simple and highly sensitive method for quantifying seven urinary androgen glucuronides. The urine samples were diluted and filtered through a membrane filter, and the filtrate was injected into a CE-MS/MS system without further sample preparation steps such as extraction and derivatization. The calibration ranges were 0.01-5 microg/mL for glucuronides of androsterone and 11beta-OHAn-3G, and 5-500 ng/mL for glucuronides of 11-ketoAn, DHEA, testosterone, epitestosterone and DHT. The linearity of the method was 0.992-0.998, and the limits-of-detection at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3 were 5-10 ng/mL. The coefficients of variation were in the range of 4.0-9.0% for intra-day assay and 4.1-9.8% for inter-day assay. The proposed method may be applicable to metabolic profiling in both quantitative and qualitative analysis.