Potential of Fourier transform mass spectrometry for high-throughput metabolomics analysis
Résumé
Metabolomics investigations have driven extensive developments in analytical platforms. Among analytical technologies, mass spectrometry plays a central role into the wide range of metabolomics applications as global metabolite profiling, absolute quantification and also metabolite structural elucidation. This chapter presents an overview of Fourier transform mass spectrometer (FT-MS) advantageous features for the large-scale measurements of metabolites. Principles of FT-MS devices are described with some details on the performance characteristics such as the highest available mass resolving power, mass measurement ability with sub-ppm errors, the most powerful dynamic range and various activation modes. Particularly, wefocused onto the usefulness of atmospheric pressure ionization sources coupled to FT analyzers for very high-throughput direct injection mass spectrometry approach. However, different analytical issues should be considered when employing Direct Injection High Resolution Mass Spectrometry approach, including matrix effects and metabolite identification complexity. The collection of large HRMS data sets constitutes only the preliminary step of the metabolomics workflow. Indeed, metabolite identification and ultimately the wished better biological understanding require traditional bioinformatics tools such as the metabolite database query but also new data processing specifically developed on the basis of HRMS data characteristics, that is, accurate mass, mass defect or highly resolved isotopic peaks.