The availability of acyl-Coenzyme A (acyl-CoA) thioester compounds affects numerous cellular functions including autophagy, lipid oxidation and synthesis, and post-translational modifications. Consequently, the acyl-CoA level changes tend to be associated with other metabolic alterations that regulate these critical cellular functions. Despite their biological importance, this class of metabolites remains difficult to detect and quantify using current analytical methods. Here we show a universal method for metabolomics that allows for the detection of an expansive set of acyl-CoA compounds and hundreds of other cellular metabolites. We apply this method to profile the dynamics of acyl-CoA compounds and corresponding alterations in metabolism across the metabolic network in response to high fat feeding in mice. We identified targeted metabolites (>50) and untargeted features (>1000) with significant changes ( Thioester compounds containing acyl-coenzyme A (acylCoA) 1 are key metabolites in intermediary metabolism. The most prominent of which is acetyl-CoA whose levels regulate critical cellular processes such as energy metabolism, protein acetylation, lipid synthesis and catabolism, and even autophagy (1-4). Other acyl-CoA compounds are also increasingly appreciated as playing important roles in diverse cellular processes (5-8). These compounds are generated from multiple pathways, such as glycolysis, the citric acid cycle (TCA cycle), beta-oxidation, and branched chain amino acid catabolism. As the acyl group carrier, acyl-CoA can partake in chemical reactions on proteins including histones resulting in mediation of chromatin biology. Therefore, considerable effort has been spent on developing methods for acyl-CoA and corresponding acyl protein modification measurements (9 -17). Liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is the most frequently used method for small molecule analysis in large part because of superior sensitivity. Moreover, LC-MS analysis can handle a broad range of complex biological mixtures and the analysis is relatively easier compared with many other methods, such as NMR, scintillation counting, and UV detection.Reversed phase LC coupled to a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer has been frequently used as for targeted measurements of specific acyl-CoA compounds, because acylCoA compounds undergo a common fragmentation, the neutral loss of adenosine diphosphate, which is the basis of multiple reaction monitoring for acyl-CoA measurements. Especially when stable isotope labeled acyl-CoA standards are used, this method has shown high accuracy and precision (11,14). However, these methods involve several laborious steps of sample purification and enrichment before LC-MS analysis, such as solid phase extraction, which in addition to often being time-and cost-prohibitive, can also result in poor sensitivity and accuracy because of imperfect metabolite recovery. Moreover, reversed phase ion-paired chromatograFrom the ‡Division