Direct sensitive quantitative LC/MS analysis of C-peptide from human urine by two dimensional reverse phase/reverse phase high-performance liquid chromatography

We describe for the first time the direct quantitative analysis of human C-peptide from urine by isotope dilution assay. Implementation of 2-D reverse phase-reverse phase chromatography (2-D RP-RP) with SIM detection resulted in high assay sensitivity (LOQ= 5 pg on column), accuracy, and method ruggedness. Our experiments demonstrate the strong resolving capability of our proposed 2-D RP-RP platform which significantly reduces strong matrix effects and their resulting quantitation error over a wide range of urine concentrations. In contrast, single column methods (both SIM and multiple reaction monitoring) were found acceptable only for strongly diluted urine samples.