Different ion mobility‐mass spectrometry coupling techniques to promote metabolomics

There is a general consensus that supports the need for standardized reporting of metadata or information describing large-scale metabolomics and other functional genomics data sets. Reporting of standard metadata provides a biological and empirical context for the data, facilitates experimental replication, and enables the re-interrogation and comparison of data by others. Accordingly, the Metabolomics Standards Initiative is building a general consensus concerning the minimum reporting standards for metabolomics experiments of which the Chemical Analysis Working Group (CAWG) is a member of this community effort. This article proposes the minimum reporting standards related to the chemical analysis aspects of metabolomics experiments including: sample preparation, experimental analysis, quality control, metabolite identification, and data pre-processing. These minimum standards currently focus mostly upon mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy due to the popularity of these techniques in metabolomics. However, additional input concerning other techniques is welcomed and can be provided via the CAWG on-line discussion forum at http://msi-workgroups.sourceforge.net/ or http://Msi-workgroups-feedback@lists.sourceforge.net. Further, community input related to this document can also be provided via this electronic forum.

Metabolites, the chemical entities that are transformed during metabolism, provide a functional readout of cellular biochemistry. With emerging technologies in mass spectrometry, thousands of metabolites can now be quantitatively measured from minimal amounts of biological material, which has thereby enabled systems-level analyses. By performing global metabolite profiling, also known as untargeted metabolomics, new discoveries linking cellular pathways to biological mechanism are being revealed and are shaping our understanding of cell biology, physiology and medicine.

Metabolite profiling in biomarker discovery, enzyme substrate assignment, drug activity/specificity determination, and basic metabolic research requires new data preprocessing approaches to correlate specific metabolites to their biological origin. Here we introduce an LC/MS-based data analysis approach, XCMS, which incorporates novel nonlinear retention time alignment, matched filtration, peak detection, and peak matching. Without using internal standards, the method dynamically identifies hundreds of endogenous metabolites for use as standards, calculating a nonlinear retention time correction profile for each sample. Following retention time correction, the relative metabolite ion intensities are directly compared to identify changes in specific endogenous metabolites, such as potential biomarkers. The software is demonstrated using data sets from a previously reported enzyme knockout study and a large-scale study of plasma samples. XCMS is freely available under an open-source license at http://metlin.scripps.edu/download/.