Acyl-CoA Identification in Mouse Liver Samples Using the In Silico CoA-Blast Tandem Mass Spectral Library

Acyl-coenzyme A derivatives (acyl-CoAs) are core molecules in the fatty acid and energy metabolism across all species. However, in vivo, many other carboxylic acids can form xenobiotic acyl-CoA esters, including drugs. More than 2467 acyl-CoAs are known from the published literature. In addition, more than 300 acyl-CoAs are covered in pathway databases, but as of October 2020, only 53 experimental acyl-CoA tandem mass spectra are present in NIST20 and MoNA libraries to enable annotation of the mass spectra in untargeted metabolomics studies. The experimental spectra originated from low-resolution ion trap and triple quadrupole mass spectrometers as well as high-resolution quadrupole-time of flight and orbital ion trap instruments at various collision energies. We used MassFrontier software and the literature to annotate fragment ions to generate fragmentation rules and intensities for the different instruments and collision energies. These rules were then applied to 1562 unique species based on [M+H]⁺ and [M–H]⁻ precursor ions to generate two mass spectra per instrument platform and collision energy, amassing an in silico library of 10,934 accurate mass MS/MS spectra that are freely available at github.com/urikeshet/CoA-Blast. The spectra can be imported into a commercial or freely available mass spectral search tool. We used the libraries to annotate 23 acyl-CoA esters in mouse liver, including 8 novel species.