High Throughput Identification and Quantification of Phospholipids in Complex Mixtures

Liposomes characterization for market approval as pharmaceutical products: Analytical methods, guidelines and standardized protocols

Liposomes are nano-sized lipid-based vesicles widely studied for their drug delivery capabilities. Compared to standard carries they exhibit better properties such as improved site-targeting and drug release, protection of drugs from degradation and clearance, and lower toxic side effects. At present, scientific literature is rich of studies regarding liposomes-based systems, while 14 types of liposomal products have been authorized to the market by EMA and FDA and many others have been approved by national agencies. Although the interest in nanodevices and nanomedicine has steadily increased in the last two decades the development of documentation regulating and standardizing all the phases of their development and quality control still suffers from major inadequacy due to the intrinsic complexity of nano-systems characterization. Many generic documents (Type 1) discussing guidelines for the study of nano-systems (lipidic and not) have been proposed while there is a lack of robust and standardized methods (Type 2 documents). As a result, a widespread of different techniques, approaches and methodologies are being used, generating results of variable quality and hard to compare with each other. Additionally, such documents are often subject to updates and rewriting further complicating the topic. Within this context the aim of this work is focused on bridging the gap in liposome characterization: the most recent standardized methodologies suitable for liposomes characterization are here reported (with the corresponding Type 2 documents) and revised in a short and pragmatical way focused on providing the reader with a practical background of the state of the art. In particular, this paper will put the accent on the methodologies developed to evaluate the main critical quality attributes (CQAs) necessary for liposomes market approval.

Quality by Design Approach in Liposomal Formulations: Robust Product Development

Nanomedicine is an emerging field with continuous growth and differentiation. Liposomal formulations are a major platform in nanomedicine, with more than fifteen FDA-approved liposomal products in the market. However, as is the case for other types of nanoparticle-based delivery systems, liposomal formulations and manufacturing is intrinsically complex and associated with a set of dependent and independent variables, rendering experiential optimization a tedious process in general. Quality by design (QbD) is a powerful approach that can be applied in such complex systems to facilitate product development and ensure reproducible manufacturing processes, which are an essential pre-requisite for efficient and safe therapeutics. Input variables (related to materials, processes and experiment design) and the quality attributes for the final liposomal product should follow a systematic and planned experimental design to identify critical variables and optimal formulations/processes, where these elements are subjected to risk assessment. This review discusses the current practices that employ QbD in developing liposomal-based nano-pharmaceuticals.

IN SITU SOLID-STATE NMR STUDY OF ANTIMICROBIAL PEPTIDE INTERACTIONs WITH ERYTHROCYTE MEMBRANES

Antimicrobial peptides are promising therapeutic agents to mitigate the global rise of antibiotic resistance. They generally act by perturbing the bacterial cell membrane and are thus less likely to induce resistance. Because they are membrane-active molecules, it is critical to verify and understand their potential action toward eukaryotic cells to help design effective and safe drugs. In this work, we studied the interaction of two antimicrobial peptides, aurein 1.2 and caerin 1.1, with red blood cell (RBC) membranes using in situ ³¹P and ²H solid-state NMR (SS-NMR). We established a protocol to integrate up to 25% of deuterated fatty acids in the membranes of ghosts, which are obtained when hemoglobin is removed from RBCs. Fatty acid incorporation and the integrity of the lipid bilayer were confirmed by SS-NMR and fluorescence confocal microscopy. Leakage assays were performed to assess the lytic power of the antimicrobial peptides. The in situ perturbation of the ghost membranes by aurein 1.2 and caerin 1.1 revealed by ³¹P and ²H SS-NMR is consistent with membrane perturbation through a carpet mechanism for aurein 1.2, whereas caerin 1.1 acts on RBCs via pore formation. These results are compatible with fluorescence microscopy images of the ghosts. The peptides interact with eukaryotic membranes following similar mechanisms that take place in bacteria, highlighting the importance of hydrophobicity when determining such interactions. Our work bridges model membranes and in vitro studies and provides an analytical toolbox to assess drug toxicity toward eukaryotic cells.

Accurate detection of perchlorate in epoxy resins via chlorine-35 quantitative quadrupolar NMR (qQNMR)

We present herein the application of a qQNMR method that uses a quadrupolar nucleus such as chlorine-35 for the quantification of perchlorate in epoxy resins.

Quantitative Quadrupolar NMR (qQNMR) via nitrogen-14 for the accurate control of L-carnitine in food supplements

A qQNMR methodology using nitrogen-14 as the quadrupolar nucleus of choice has been introduced for the first time as a robust and validated method to determine and quantify L-carnitine in food supplements. The quantification has been carried out by the alternative use of a calibration curve or by addition of ammonium chloride as internal standard. The method was validated at seven concentration levels in the range of 5.58-99.26 mM, affording intra- and inter day accuracies lower than 6.84% (expressed in CV), robustness towards temperature and recycle delay, limit of detection (LOD) of 2.48 mM, limit of quantification (LOQ) of 5.58 mM and remarkably with absence of matrix effect.

Quantitative quadrupolar NMR (qQNMR) using nitrogen-14 for the determination of choline in complex matrixes

NMR offers the unique potential to selectively excite the chosen nuclei avoiding in an extraordinary way the matrix effect. Quantitative Nitrogen-14 NMR (¹⁴N qNMR) spectroscopy has been introduced for the first time as a robust and validated method to determine choline in a variety of matrixes including quinoa grains, instant coffee and food supplements. A study about the ion pairing of choline bitartrate in aqueous solution by means of diffusion PGSE, NOESY and HOESY NMR have been also provided. Validation of the method within eight concentrations levels (from 1.58 to 79.0 mM) afforded a limit of detection of 400 μg/mL (1.58 mM), a quantification limit of 1000 μg/mL (3.95 mM), excellent linearity (R² higher than 0.999), intra-/inter-day precisions lower than 1.24% (CV), recoveries of 93.5%-102.5%, and complete absence of matrix effect. The fast and reliable quantification of choline together with the accuracy and simplicity of this new approach make it useful in the development of analytical procedures that could dramatically affect traditional analysis.

Phosphatidylcholines from Pieris brassicae eggs activate an immune response in Arabidopsis

Recognition of conserved microbial molecules activates immune responses in plants, a process termed pattern-triggered immunity (PTI). Similarly, insect eggs trigger defenses that impede egg development or attract predators, but information on the nature of egg-associated elicitors is scarce. We performed an unbiased bioactivity-guided fractionation of eggs of the butterfly Pieris brassicae. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry of active fractions led to the identification of phosphatidylcholines (PCs). PCs are released from insect eggs, and they induce salicylic acid and H₂O₂ accumulation, defense gene expression and cell death in Arabidopsis, all of which constitute a hallmark of PTI. Active PCs contain primarily C16 to C18-fatty acyl chains with various levels of desaturation, suggesting a relatively broad ligand specificity of cell-surface receptor(s). The finding of PCs as egg-associated molecular patterns (EAMPs) illustrates the acute ability of plants to detect conserved immunogenic patterns from their enemies, even from seemingly passive structures such as eggs.

Analytical characterization of liposomes and other lipid nanoparticles for drug delivery

Lipid nanoparticles, especially liposomes and lipid/nucleic acid complexed nanoparticles have shown great success in the pharmaceutical industry. Their success is attributed to stable drug loading, extended pharmacokinetics, reduced off-target side effects, and enhanced delivery efficiency to disease targets with formidable blood-brain or plasma membrane barriers. Therefore, they offer promising formulation options for drugs limited by low therapeutic indexes in traditional dosage forms and current "undruggable" targets. Recent development of siRNA, antisense oligonucleotide, or the CRISPR complex-loaded lipid nanoparticles and liposomal vaccines also shed light on their potential in enabling versatile formulation platforms for new pharmaceutical modalities. Analytical characterization of these nanoparticles is critical to drug design, formulation development, understanding in vivo performance, as well as quality control. The multi-lipid excipients, unique core-bilayer structure, and nanoscale size all underscore their complicated critical quality attributes, including lipid species, drug encapsulation efficiency, nanoparticle characteristics, product stability, and drug release. To address these challenges and facilitate future applications of lipid nanoparticles in drug development, we summarize available analytical approaches for physicochemical characterizations of lipid nanoparticle-based pharmaceutical modalities. Furthermore, we compare advantages and challenges of different techniques, and highlight the promise of new strategies for automated high-throughput screening and future development.

31P NMR Quantification of Phospholipids and Lysophospholipids in Food Emulsions

For food emulsions containing enzymatically modified egg yolk, the conventional Folch extraction does not fully recover the polar lysophospholipids. This can be overcome by repeated methanol extractions. After solvent evaporation, the extracted (lyso)phospholipids are solubilized into mixed micelles with cholate as a detergent. The solubilized (lyso)phospholipids can be accurately quantified by ³¹P NMR with recoveries ranging between 96% and 108%. Detection at a high (16.4 T) relative to a mainstream (9.4 T) magnetic field strength did not offer a significant advantage since the slow molecular tumbling of the mixed micelles increased line widths. This was due to field-strength-dependent chemical shift anisotropy relaxation. Method precision is similar at 9.4 and 16.4 T, with within-laboratory reproducibilities of 7-22% and 12-25%, respectively. The method can be implemented as a routine analytical procedure at 9.4 T (400 MHz NMR spectrometer), and the limits of detection and quantification are adequate for the verification of the standard of identity of a mayonnaise prepared with enzymatically modified egg yolk.

Multivariate Curve Resolution for 2D Solid-State NMR spectra

We present a processing method, based on the multivariate curve resolution approach (MCR), to denoise 2D solid-state NMR spectra, yielding a substantial S/N ratio increase while preserving the lineshapes and relative signal intensities. These spectral features are particularly important in the quantification of silicon species, where sensitivity is limited by the low natural abundance of the ²⁹Si nuclei and by the dilution of the intrinsic protons of silica, but can be of interest also when dealing with other intermediate-to-low receptivity nuclei. This method also offers the possibility of coprocessing multiple 2D spectra that have the signals at the same frequencies but with different intensities (e.g.: as a result of a variation in the mixing time). The processing can be carried out on the time-domain data, thus preserving the possibility of applying further processing to the data. As a demonstration, we have applied Cadzow denoising on the MCR-processed FIDs, achieving a further increase in the S/N ratio and more effective denoising also on the transients at longer indirect evolution times. We have applied the combined denoising on a set of experimental data from a lysozyme-silica composite.

A Thermolabile Phospholipase B from Talaromyces marneffei GD-0079: Biochemical Characterization and Structure Dynamics Study

Phospholipase B (EC 3.1.1.5) are a distinctive group of enzymes that catalyzes the hydrolysis of fatty acids esterified at the sn-1 and sn-2 positions forming free fatty acids and lysophospholipids. The structural information and catalytic mechanism of phospholipase B are still not clear. Herein, we reported a putative phospholipase B (TmPLB1) from Talaromyces marneffei GD-0079 synthesized by genome mining library. The gene (TmPlb1) was expressed and the TmPLB1 was purified using E. coli shuffle T7 expression system. The putative TmPLB1 was purified by affinity chromatography with a yield of 13.5%. The TmPLB1 showed optimum activity at 35 °C and pH 7.0. The TmPLB1 showed enzymatic activity using Lecithin (soybean > 98% pure), and the hydrolysis of TmPLB1 by ³¹P NMR showed phosphatidylcholine (PC) as a major phospholipid along with lyso-phospholipids (1-LPC and 2-LPC) and some minor phospholipids. The molecular modeling studies indicate that its active site pocket contains Ser125, Asp183 and His215 as the catalytic triad. The structure dynamics and simulations results explained the conformational changes associated with different environmental conditions. This is the first report on biochemical characterization and structure dynamics of TmPLB1 enzyme. The present study could be helpful to utilize TmPLB1 in food industry for the determination of food components containing phosphorus. Additionally, such enzyme could also be useful in Industry for the modifications of phospholipids.

Analytical Evaluation of Low-Field 31P NMR Spectroscopy for Lipid Analysis

We investigate the potential of ³¹P NMR with simple, maintenance-free benchtop spectrometers to probe phospholipids in complex mixtures. ³¹P NMR-based lipidomics has become an important topic in a wide range of applications in food- and health-sciences, and the continuous improvements of compact, maintenance- and cryogen-free instruments opens new opportunities for NMR routine analyses. A prior milestone is the evaluation of the analytical performance provided by ³¹P NMR at low magnetic field. To address this, we assess the ability of state-of-the-art benchtop NMR spectrometers to detect, identify, and quantify several types of phospholipids in mixtures. Relying on heteronuclear cross-polarization experiments, phospholipids can be detected in 2 h with a limit of detection of 0.5 mM at 1 T and 0.2 mM at 2 T, while the headgroups of phosphatidylcholine (PC), phosphatidyl-ethanolamine (PE), phosphatidylinositol (PI), phosphatidylserine (PS), and phosphatidyl-glycerol (PG) can be unambiguously assigned based on 2D ¹H-³¹P total correlated spectroscopy (TOCSY) spectra. Furthermore, two quantitative methods to obtain absolute concentrations are proposed and discussed, and the performance is evaluated regarding precision and accuracy.

Automated multicomponent phospholipid analysis using 31P NMR spectroscopy: example of vegetable lecithin and krill oil

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is widely applied in the field of metabolomics due to its quantitative nature and the reproducibility of data generated. However, one of the main challenges in routine NMR analysis is to obtain valuable information from large datasets of raw data in a high-throughput, automatic, and reproducible manner. In this study, a method to automatically annotate and quantify 12 phospholipids (PLs) in vegetable lecithin (soy, sunflower, rape) and krill oil is introduced. Automated routines were written in MATLAB environment for quantification of phosphatidylcholine (PC), phosphatidylinositol (PI), lyso-phosphatidylcholine (LPC), phosphatidylserine (PS), phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), diphosphatidylglycerol or cardiolipin (DPG), phosphatidylglycerol (PG), and lyso-phosphatidylethanolamine (LPE) in lecithin and of PC, PC-ether, LPC, PE, N-acyl phosphatidylethanolamine (APE), and LPE in krill oil matrix. The routine includes NMR spectra import, extraction of data points, peaking of local minima and local maxima in the data, integration, quantitation against internal standard, reporting of results as Word file, and their importing in our internal database. Our extensive studies on a representative set of more than 1000 lecithin (soy, rape, sunflower) and krill samples showed that the routine can automatically and accurately calculate the concentrations of all PLs. No systematic or proportional differences between automated and manual evaluation were detected. The developed automated program produces accurate results and requires less than 5 s for each analysis. This tool is already used in high-throughput PL analysis of krill and lecithin and will be adjusted to other matrices (egg, milk, chocolate, etc.) as well.

Quantification of Ammonium Phosphatide Emulsifiers in Chocolate Using 31P NMR Spectroscopy

³¹P NMR is a valuable tool to study phosphorus-containing biomolecules from complex mixtures. One important group of such molecules are phosphorus-containing emulsifiers, including lecithins and ammonium phosphatides (AMPs), which are used in chocolate production. By developing extraction protocols and applying high resolution ³¹P nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), we enable identification of the type of emulsifier used in chocolate. We furthermore demonstrate that this method allows quantification of AMPs in chocolate. To our knowledge, this is the first method that allows verification of the type and amount of emulsifier present in chocolate samples.

Pushing the frontiers: boron-11 NMR as a method for quantitative boron analysis and its application to determine boric acid in commercial biocides

Quantitative boron-11 NMR (11B qNMR) spectroscopy has been introduced for the first time as a method to determine boric acid content in commercial biocides. Validation of the method affords a limit of detection of 0.02% w/w and a limit of quantification of 0.04% w/w, which are low enough to determine boric acid in commercial biocides. Other figures of merit such as linearity (R2 > 0.99), recovery (93.6%-106.2%), intra- and inter-day precision (from 0.7 to 2.0%), uncertainty (3.7 to 4.4%) and matrix effects were also evaluated. This method was successfully applied to determine boric acid in five different commercial biocides in a wide range of concentrations (<0.05 to 10% w/w) providing excellent results when they were compared with those obtained using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The suitability of this method for a fast and reliable quantification of boric acid in commercial biocide preparations has been demonstrated. The absence of the matrix effect allows the application of this validated method for the determination of boric acid in other matrices of diverse composition.

Quantitative determination and validation of octreotide acetate using 1 H-NMR spectroscopy with internal standard method

Quantitative nuclear magnetic resonance (qNMR) is a well-established technique in quantitative analysis. We presented a validated ¹ H-qNMR method for assay of octreotide acetate, a kind of cyclic octopeptide. Deuterium oxide was used to remove the undesired exchangeable peaks, which was referred to as proton exchange, in order to make the quantitative signals isolated in the crowded spectrum of the peptide and ensure precise quantitative analysis. Gemcitabine hydrochloride was chosen as the suitable internal standard. Experimental conditions, including relaxation delay time, the numbers of scans, and pulse angle, were optimized first. Then method validation was carried out in terms of selectivity, stability, linearity, precision, and robustness. The assay result was compared with that by means of high performance liquid chromatography, which is provided by Chinese Pharmacopoeia. The statistical F test, Student's t test, and nonparametric test at 95% confidence level indicate that there was no significant difference between these two methods. qNMR is a simple and accurate quantitative tool with no need for specific corresponding reference standards. It has the potential of the quantitative analysis of other peptide drugs and standardization of the corresponding reference standards.

Applications of nuclear magnetic resonance in lipid analyses: An emerging powerful tool for lipidomics studies

The role of lipids in cell, tissue, and organ physiology is crucial; as many diseases, including cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative, and infectious diseases, are closely related to absorption and metabolism of lipids. Mass spectrometry (MS) based methods are the most developed powerful tools to study the synthetic pathways and metabolic networks of cellular lipids in biological systems; leading to the birth of an emerging subject lipidomics, which has been extensively reviewed. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), another powerful analytical tool, which allows the visualization of single atoms and molecules, is receiving increasing attention in lipidomics analyses. However, very little work focusing on lipidomic studies using NMR has been critically reviewed. This paper presents a first comprehensive summary of application of ¹H, ¹³C &³¹P NMR in lipids and lipidomics analyses. The scientific basis, principles and characteristic diagnostic peaks assigned to specific atoms/molecular structures of lipids are presented. Applications of 2D NMR in mapping and monitoring of the components and their changes in complex lipids systems, as well as alteration of lipid profiling over disease development are also reviewed. The applications of NMR lipidomics in diseases diagnosis and food adulteration are exemplified.

A simple low-cost single-crystal NMR setup

A low-cost single-crystal NMR kit is presented along with a web-based post-processing software. The kit consists of a piezo-crystal motor and a goniometer for the crystal, both embedded in a standard wide-bore NMR probe with a 3D printed scaffold. The NMR pulse program controls the angle setting automatically, and the post-processing software incorporates a range of orientation-angle discrepancies present in the kit and other single-crystal setups. Results with a NaNO3 single-crystal show a high degree of reproducibility and excellent agreement with previous findings for the anisotropic quadrupolar interaction.