Development of an electrospray-mass spectral database for annotating metabolomics datasets: application to the analysis of the adult human urinary metabolome

摘要

Metabolomics opens new perspectives for biomarker discovery in the field of nutrition and heath, and also in the development of system biology. The metabolic profiles of biofluids obtained by mass spectrometry or nuclear magnetic resonance contain a few hundreds to thousands of signals. However, a major part of this information remains unknown, or at least not characterized in the analytical systems, thus hampering the obtention of biologically meaningfull data. In this context, we here report on the development of an electrospray (ESI) spectral database for the annotation of high resolution mass spectrometry based metabolomics data sets and on its application to the analysis of urine samples from a cohort of healthy volunteers.