N-Acetylglucosamine is a key component of bacterial
and fungal cell walls and of the extracellular matrix of animal cells.
It plays a variety of roles at the cell surface structure and is under
discussion to be involved in signaling pathways. The presence of a
number of N-acetylhexosamine stereoisomers in samples
of biological or biotechnological origin demands for dedicated high
efficiency separation methods, due to identical exact mass and similar
fragmentation patterns of the stereoisomers. Gas chromatography offers
high sample capacity, separation efficiency, and precision under repeatability
conditions of measurement, which is a necessity for the analysis of
low abundant stereoisomers in biological samples. Automated online
derivatization facilitates to overcome the main obstacle for the use
of gas chromatography in metabolomics, namely, the derivatization
of polar metabolites prior to analysis. Using alkoximation and subsequent
trimethylsilylation, carbohydrates and their derivatives are known
to show several derivatives, since derivatization is incomplete as
well as highly matrix dependent inherent to the high number of functional
groups present in carbohydrates. A method based on efficient separation
of ethoximated and trimethylsilylated N-acetylglucosamines
was developed. Accurate absolute quantification is enabled using biologically
derived 13C labeled internal standards eliminating systematic
errors related to sample pretreatment and analysis. Due to the lack
of certified reference materials, a methodological comparison between
tandem and time-of-flight mass spectrometric instrumentation was performed
for mass spectrometric assessment of trueness. Both methods showed
limits of detection in the lower femtomol range. The methods were
applied to biological samples of Penicillium chrysogenum cultivations with different matrices revealing excellent agreement
of both mass spectrometric techniques.