Mass Spectrometry
Mass spectrometry has been used routinely in bioanalysis for many years.
The recent advances in instrumentation have opened up such platforms for high-throughput, untargeted metabonomics.
Routine untargeted mass spectrometric analysis of biofluids for metabonomics has become possible over recent years and is becoming a commonplace profiling tool that complements NMR. Enabled by innovative technological solutions from instrumental vendors and increased availability of computational power, mass spectrometric analyses can access a huge number of metabolites, often with very high sensitivity.
Instrumentation for chromatographic separation has also improved dramatically in recent years as a result of vendor investment in ultra-high pressure technologies (e.g. Waters Acquity UPLC). The increased resolution of these separations permits a large number of minor components to be resolved and detected in routine metabonomic analysis when combined with high resolution mass spectrometric detection methods.
The application of mass spectrometry to large epidemiological sample sets presents a number of logistical and operations challenges that are currently being addressed by researchers in Biomolecular Medicine and will underpin work to understand intermediate biological signatures that link environmental exposures and disease.
Key Project
Key Recent Publications
Want EJ, Wilson ID, Gika H, Theodoridis G, Plumb RS, Shockcor J, Holmes E, Nicholson JK. 2010. Global metabolic profiling procedures for urine using UPLC-MS. Nat Protoc 5(6):1005-18.
Want EJ, Coen M, Masson P, Keun HC, Pearce JT, Reily MD, Robertson DG, Rohde CM, Holmes E, Lindon JC and others. 2010. Ultra performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry profiling of bile acid metabolites in biofluids: application to experimental toxicology studies. Anal Chem 82(12):5282-9.
Ipsen A, Want EJ, Lindon JC, Ebbels TM. A statistically rigorous test for the identification of parent-fragment pairs in LC-MS datasets. Anal Chem 82(5):1766-78.
Want EJ, Nordstrom A, Morita H, Siuzdak G. 2007. From exogenous to endogenous: the inevitable imprint of mass spectrometry in metabolomics. J Proteome Res 6(2):459-68.
