Microbore liquid chromatography ultraviolet detection for quantification of total peptide amount and its application for assessing sample quality in shotgun proteome analysis of hundreds of cells.

•Microbore LC-UV was developed for determining the total amount of peptides.•A step-gradient was used to remove salts and then elute the peptides from a digest.•The peak area was used to quantifying the peptides ranging from 39ng to 5μg.•The method was helpful to monitor the performance of proteome sample preparation.•The method is useful for analyzing the proteome of a small number of cells.