Analysis of Human Plasma Metabolites across Different Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry Platforms

Published

March 15, 2016

Author(s)

Kelly H. Telu, Xinjian Yan, William E. Wallace, Stephen Stein, Yamil Simon

Abstract

The development of increasingly sensitive analytical techniques has renewed interest in global metabolite profiling, i.e., the semi-quantitative monitoring of all the chemical constituents of biological fluids. In this work, global metabolite profiles of National Institute of Standards and Technology Standard Reference Material (SRM) 1950, "Metabolites in Human Plasma", measured on different LC-MS platforms are compared. Difficulties associated with the analysis and the reproducibility of the experiments on each platform are discussed in detail. Run to run, batch to batch, and limited inter-laboratory comparisons show that untargeted SRM 1950 profiling is highly reproducible when working on the same platform; however, substantial differences were found in the LC-MS patterns originating on different platforms. Most differences were associated with the interface (ion source) and not with the chromatographic behavior (LC) of the sample or the nature of the mass analyzer (MS). Co-elution of many similar components, multiple ions of the same component, artifacts, in-source fragmentation and other complicating factors present in the chromatographic patterns are discussed. Multivariate statistical methods, implemented both with commercial software and with in-house computational tools, have been developed for analyzing the reproducibility on different LC-MS platforms. In general, different platforms render significantly different metabolite profiles, but the results are highly reproducible when working within one platform, where relative standard deviations of relative ion abundances are commonly less than 1 % for the main components.

Citation

Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry

Volume

30

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

SRM 1950, Human Plasma Standard Reference Material, Untargeted Metabolomics, Global Metabolite Profiling, Human Metabolome, Liquid Chromatography-Electrospray Mass Spectrometry, Reversed Phase Chromatography

Citation

Telu, K. , Yan, X. , Wallace, W. , Stein, S. and Simon, Y. (2016), Analysis of Human Plasma Metabolites across Different Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry Platforms, Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (Accessed April 25, 2024)