ABSTRACT
Background Metabolomics refers to an all-inclusive proling of low-molecular weight metabolites with an implicit aim to interpret results in the context of the organism’s genome and its global metabolic network [1-4]. e term metabolic proling
is used to denote either targeted or non-targeted proling of small molecules in biological samples. A targeted analysis focuses on specic, a priori known compounds, and therefore only parts of the chromatogram data matrix generated by the instrument may be considered rele vant. In a non-targeted approach all detectable signals are analyzed, and the aim of such analysis is to achieve as wide coverage of metabolites as permitted by a particular experimental technique. A non-targeted metabolic proling is an essential component of metabolomics, together with bioinformatics approaches for data analysis, interpretation, and integration [1-4]. In recent years metabolic proling is increasingly being used in studies of microbial metabolism [5], biomarker discovery [6], toxicology [7,8], nutrition [9,10], and integrated systems biology [4,11]. Hyphenated mass spectrometry approaches, in particular gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS) [1,12,13] and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) [2,14], are often used for metabolic proling because of their inherent robustness, sensitivity, and large dynamic range.
