A gender-specific discriminator in Sprague-Dawley rat urine: the deployment of a metabolic profiling strategy for biomarker discovery and identification.

The use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) as complementary analytical techniques for open metabolic profiling is illustrated in the context of defining urinary biochemical discriminators between male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. Subsequent to the discovery of a female-specific urinary discriminator by LC-MS, further LC, MS, and NMR methods have been applied in a coordinated effort to identify this urinary component. Thereafter, the biological relevance and context of the identified component, in this case a steroid metabolite, has been achieved. This approach will be deployed in future studies of disease, drug efficacy, and toxicity to discover and identify biologically relevant markers.