UNC: Accelerating Targeted Bile Acid Quantitation by LC-MS/MS
⚡ Brief Summary In this presentation from the Thermo Fisher Breakfast Seminar at ASMS 2026, Whitney Stutts, director of the Metabolomics and Proteomics Core at UNC Chapel Hill, shares her core’s hands-on experience as an early adopter of the Move Analytical MoveKit™ BA bile acid kit. Her facility ran the 32-analyte panel across both high-resolution and Stellar platforms and used it as a training opportunity for a graduate student new to the field. Whitney walks through the end-to-end kit workflow, the real-time data quality checks surfaced in the MoveApp™ dashboard, and early results from a prebiotic-intervention pilot study with the UNC microbiome core, including a notable shift from glycine- to taurine-conjugated bile acids and an increase in the total circulating bile acid pool after supplementation.
🧪 What You’ll Learn You’ll learn:
- How an external core facility implemented the MoveKit BA kit end-to-end, from sample prep through data analysis
- How the streamlined run setup, system suitability tests, and real-time QC dashboard simplify a targeted bile acid workflow
- What kit coverage and cross-platform agreement looked like in practice (31 of 32 bile acids in feces, 28 in serum, including sulfated species; strong correlation across instruments and in a Thermo multi-lab comparison)
- What early biology emerged from a prebiotic intervention pilot — conjugation shifts, individual microbiome variability, and serum vs. fecal bile acid differences