Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) maintain and promote infant health. Most of the current methods for HMOs quantitation require labor-intensive and time-consuming steps for sample preparation. This study presents two very simple and easy-to-operate pretreatment methods, requiring either ultrafiltration or centrifugation to separate free oligosaccharides from whole fat human milk and other milk matrix before oligosaccharides labeling for quantifying HMOs using ultrahigh pressure liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection. A single chromatography run quantified 15 sialylated and neutral HMOs with high sensitivity (with an LOD less than 8 pg for all HMOs tested: about 1 pg for 2'-fucosyllactose, 3-fucosyllactose, 4'-galactosyllactose, 3'-galactosyllactose, and 6'-galactosyllactose) and good linearity with coefficient of correlation above 0.999. Accuracy and precision were satisfactory for both pretreatment methods. Overall, the centrifugation pretreatment was efficient and reliable for samples with high levels of oligosaccharides, and the ultrafiltration pretreatment was especially suitable for samples with low oligosaccharide abundance.
Keywords: fluorescence detection; human milk oligosaccharides; quantitation; ultrahigh pressure liquid chromatography.