Determination of individual long‐chain fatty acyl‐CoA esters in heart and skeletal muscle

Abstract
A method has been developed for determination of individual long-chain fatty acyl-CoA esters from heart and skeletal muscle using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The esters were extracted from freezeclamped tissue of pig and rat hearts and rat skeletal muscle for analysis on a radially compressed C18 5μ reversephase column. Nine peaks in the extract with carbon chain lengths from C12 to C20 that subsequently disappeared on alkaline hydrolysis were identified. The major acyl-CoA peaks were 14∶1, 18∶2, 16∶0 and 18∶1 and additionally in rat heart 18∶0. Total long-chain acyl-CoA esters obtained by summation of the individual molecular species was 11.34±1.48 nmol/g wet wt. pig heart; 14.51±2.11 nmol/g wet wt. in rat heart, and 4.35±0.71 nmol/g wet wt. in rat skeletal muscle. These values were approximately 132% of those obtained using a separate procedure that measured total CoA by HPLC after alkaline hydrolysis of the esters. The described method demonstrates the quantitation of individual acyl-CoA species in muscle tissue. Therefore, it has a number of advantages in that it permits information to be obtained on the individual molecular species under various nutritional and metabolic conditions.