Comment on “Optimized Preprocessing of Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry Urinary Metabolic Profiles for Improved Information Recovery”

Metabolomics applied to urine samples has clearly demonstrated the potential to select possible biomarkers, despite the complexity of acquisition and elaboration of untargeted metabolic profiles. Many analytical aspects of this approach (chromatogram acquisition, “peak-picking” process and statistical analysis), have already been considered in scientific literature. In the paper of Veselkov and co-workers recently published some strategies to stabilize the technical variance within metabolic profiles acquired by UPLC-MS, and to normalize signal intensities were proposed (Anal. Chem. 2011, 83, 5864-5872). The described methods are interesting, but they also raise a number of questions that should be addressed. In particular we commented on the applicability and advantages of these methods in the context of a complete (e.g. from chromatogram acquisition to marker identification) metabolomics studies on human subjects.

MATTARUCCHI Elia;  GUILLOU Claude; 

2012-01-04

AMER CHEMICAL SOC

JRC66694

0003-2700,   

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac202416r,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC66694,   

10.1021/ac202416r,