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American Chemical Society, Analytical Chemistry, 14(86), p. 6812-6817, 2014

DOI: 10.1021/ac501530d

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RAMClust: A Novel Feature Clustering Method Enables Spectral-Matching-Based Annotation for Metabolomics Data

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

Metabolomic data is frequently acquired using chromatographically coupled mass spectrometry platforms. For such datasets, the first step in data analysis relies on feature detection, where a feature is defined by a mass and retention time. While a feature typically is derived from a single compound, a spectrum of mass signals is more a more accurate representation of the mass spectrometric signal for a given metabolite. Here we report a novel feature grouping method which operates in an unsupervised manner to group signals from MS data into spectra without relying on predictability of the in-source phenomenon. We additionally address a fundamental bottleneck in metabolomics, annotation of MS level signals, by incorporating indiscriminant MS/MS (idMS/MS) data implicitly: feature detection is performed on both MS and indiscriminant MS/MS data, and feature-feature relationships are determined simultaneously from the MS and idMS/MS data. This approach facilitates identification of metabolites using in-source MS and/or idMS/MS spectra from a single experiment, reduces quantitative analytical variation as compared to single feature measures, and decreases false positive annotations of unpredictable phenomenon as novel compounds. This tool is released as a freely available R package, called RAMClustR, and is sufficiently versatile to group features from any chromatographic-spectrometric platform or feature finding software.