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.