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Review
. 2023 Feb 28;95(8):3909-3916.
doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.2c05192. Epub 2023 Feb 15.

Ensuring Fact-Based Metabolite Identification in Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-Based Metabolomics

Georgios Theodoridis  1   2   3 , Helen Gika  2   3   4 , Daniel Raftery  5   6 , Royston Goodacre  7 , Robert S Plumb  8 , Ian D Wilson  7   9
Affiliations
Review

Ensuring Fact-Based Metabolite Identification in Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-Based Metabolomics

Georgios Theodoridis et al. Anal Chem. .

Abstract

Metabolite identification represents a major bottleneck in contemporary metabolomics research and a step where critical errors may occur and pass unnoticed. This is especially the case for studies employing liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry technology, where there is increased concern on the validity of the proposed identities. In the present perspective article, we describe the issue and categorize the errors into two types: identities that show poor biological plausibility and identities that do not comply with chromatographic data and thus to physicochemical properties (usually hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity) of the proposed molecule. We discuss the problem, present characteristic examples, and propose measures to improve the situation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Plot of the number of publications per year for the four major omics disciplines. A significant increase is observed for transcriptomics and metabolomics publication in the last 5 years so both fields have caught up with genomics and proteomics which 15 years ago represented a several-fold larger number of publications. Search was made in Scopus (August 2022).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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