Microscale Separation Methods for Metabolomics

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 199 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0173-0835
• DOI: 10.1002/elps.201090056

✦ Synopsis

Microscale Separation Methods for Metabolomics

The metabolome is the complete set of endogenous low-molecular-weight metabolites in cells, tissues, body fluids and plants. The comprehensive analysis of these metabolites in biological samples is known as metabolomics. Metabolomics is particularly useful for gaining insight into the patho-physiological state of living systems as endogenous metabolites represent real end-points of biochemical pathways. Advanced analytical techniques and multivariate data analysis are needed for global metabolic profiling and biomarker discovery. Next to NMR, efficient separation techniques such as gas chromatography, liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis (CE) are very suitable for this goal. Especially, if these techniques are combined with mass spectrometry (MS), powerful systems for metabolomics are obtained.

This issue emphasizes the possibilities of CE for the analysis of the metabolome of different samples. A few papers pay attention to chromatographic methods and sample pretreatment. CE is well suited for the separation of polar ionogenic and charged compounds and, therefore, very attractive for this type of analysis. New technological developments and the potential of CE-MS are described. Both targeted analysis of one class of metabolites and non-targeted analysis are demonstrated. It is also shown that the right data interpretation is essential to acquire useful biological information. The importance of CE and, generally, of microscale separation methods for metabolomics is rapidly increasing and the papers published in this issue give an overview of this field.