Preface
The metabolome is the composition of all metabolites in an organism. These metabolites are the final products of the organism's gene expression and can reflect the state of the organism's gene expression. Through metabolomics analysis, we detect metabolites in human blood, feces or tissues to understand the metabolic processes within the human body, help people understand their health status and disease risks, and achieve the goal of personalized medicine and precision medicine. Among them, liquid chromatography mass spectrometer (LC-MS) is one of the most commonly used technologies in metabolome analysis. It is a high-end analytical instrument that combines liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. It can be used to detect metabolites in biological samples and perform structural identification and quantitative analysis of these metabolites.
Principles of Molecular Identification by Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry
Even if two people have the same weight, their heads, torsos, hands, and feet have different features, and we can distinguish two people of the same weight based on the weight of these parts. Similarly, we can imagine two people of the same weight as two substances with the same molecular weight, and imagine the mass spectrometer as a scale accurate to four decimal places. The mass spectrometer can smash metabolites of the same molecular weight, and then we can use the characteristics of these fragments to identify the molecules. Since LC-MS has the advantages of high sensitivity, high resolution and high precision, and can detect more metabolites with limited sample size, it is widely used in fields such as metabolomics analysis.
Applications of Metabolome Analysis
Information on the composition of metabolites in the environment, organisms, and food can be obtained through LC-MS. Therefore, in addition to studying human health, LC-MS also has important applications in environmental science, food safety, and other fields. With the update of instruments and equipment and the improvement of analytical technology, we believe that metabolome analysis combined with LC-MS will bring more and more comprehensive information to various research fields and help researchers expand the depth and breadth of experiments.
