Formic acid hydrolysis/liquid chromatography isotope dilution mass spectrometry: An accurate method for large DNA quantification

•LC-IDMS with formic acid hydrolysis was established for quantification of λDNA.•This method could quantify λDNA with expanded uncertainty of 3.1%.•This method was validated by phosphate-base quantification obtained with ICP-MS.•DNA reference material would be quantified by using the present method.

Liquid chromatography-isotope dilution mass spectrometry (LC-IDMS) with formic acid hydrolysis was established for the accurate quantification of λDNA. The over-decomposition of nucleobases in formic acid hydrolysis was restricted by optimizing the reaction temperature and the reaction time, and accurately corrected by using deoxynucleotides (dNMPs) and isotope-labeled dNMPs as the calibrator and the internal standard, respectively. The present method could quantify λDNA with an expanded uncertainty of 4.6% using 10 fmol of λDNA. The analytical results obtained with the present method were validated by comparing with the results of phosphate-base quantification by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The results showed good agreement with each other. We conclude that the formic acid hydrolysis/LC-IDMS method can quantify λDNA accurately and is promising as the primary method for the certification of DNA as reference material.