Speeding up Mass Spectrometry: Determining the Effect of Mass Spectrometry Scan Speeds on Data Reproducibility for Metabolomics Analyses

摘要

Recently, there has been a trend towards faster chromatography for qualitative mass spectrometry applications, resulting in narrower chromatographic peak widths. As a result, slow-scanning mass spectrometers have been challenged with trying to acquire sufficient data to define these narrow peaks adequately. In this work, we sought to evaluate the mass spectrometer scan speed required to provide accurate, reproducible data when coupled to high speed LC systems in a metabolomics workflow. In non-targeted metabolomics experiments, scientists try to find real biological variation between groups of samples. To do this, researchers find and identify compounds that are either uniquely present or are just specifically up-/down-regulated in a particular group of samples, so-called biomarkers. The biomarkers are often quite minor and can easily be masked by other differences between the samples that are unrelated to biology, and could be artefacts related to sample handling, data acquisition or data processing.