AUTHOR=Qiu Shi , Guo Sifan , Yang Qiang , Xie Yiqiang , Tang Songqi , Zhang Aihua 

TITLE=Innovation in identifying metabolites from complex metabolome—Highlights of recent analytical platforms and protocols

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Chemistry

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/chemistry/articles/10.3389/fchem.2023.1129717

DOI=10.3389/fchem.2023.1129717

ISSN=2296-2646

ABSTRACT=In 2022, five studies on analytical platforms for identifying metabolites and delineating
their contribution by high-throughput mass spectrometry metabolomics were published
in Nature Protocols.1-5 These studies have showed metabolic profiling of candidate
metabolites as dominant technology enables rapid detection of the metabolic features
in the spectral data, which may lead spectral and peak data preprocessing, statistical
analysis and functional interpretation. These five publications facilitated the extraction
of chemical signals, contributed to identify novel metabolites and identify differential
metabolites, and discover new functional biomarkers related metabolites leading to
better diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Future works aimed at developing the
integrated strategy for enhancing the accuracy of discovering a list of biological activity
metabolites with pathological basis of diseases, could provide a large number of the
relatively abundant ions and acquire more reliable identifications, and then shed light
on the functional changes of small molecule metabolites more closely. Moreover, it
should establish multi-cycle training optimization models of experimental and clinical
studies to validate the overall prediction performance of particular metabolite bioactivity
and relevant biological significance for disease diagnosis and prognostic treatment that
are worthy of further exploration. In the future, the integrated use of computational
algorithms, artificial intelligence, and big data mining method will improve the precise
identification ability of metabolites for resulting optimization and verification.