Hydrophobic Interaction Liquid Chromatography Untargeted Plant Metabolomics for Soybean Amino Acid Pathway Analysis

June 3, 2025

Soybean is a commercially important protein source for human and animal consumption globally. For poultry, its un-supplemented sulfur amino acid cysteine and methionine composition at less than 3.5% dry weight protein is insufficient. Sulfur amino acid composition improvement by breeding and gene-editing require high-throughput amino acid quantitation in both free and proteinaceous form. Global metabolite profiling can also inform on the modified biology and potentially substitute as a screening tool for free amino acid measurement, albeit with the constraints that pathway metabolites on the high polarity and low molecular weight range are chromatographically retained. Here we apply a hydrophobic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) orbitrap metabolomics approach 2 to global amino acid pathway profiling in soybean.