Untargeted Metabolomics Using Orbitrap-Based GC-MS

Introduction

Metabolomics aims to characterize and quantify the complete small molecule complement, or metabolome, of a biological system. The metabolome consists of a diverse mixture of small molecules, including amino acids, sugars and phosphosugars, and biogenic amines and lipids. Untargeted metabolomics is exceptionally challenging due to the requirement to both identify and quantify hundreds of different compounds with limited a priori knowledge of the metabolites. It is, therefore, advantageous to use a detection system that is not only capable of sensitive detection of specific molecules in an untargeted way, but can also provide accurate mass information for confident confirmation and structural elucidation of unknowns.