Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 14, 2025
Untargeted Metabolomics from Biological Sources Using Ultraperformance Liquid Chromatography-High Resolution Mass Spectrometry UPLC-HRMS
Published on: May 20, 2013
Repurposing proteomic nanoLC-MS platforms for untargeted metabolomics: evaluating DIA and polarity switching
Frederico G Pinto1,2, Alexander D Giddey1, Nesrin Mohamed1
1Center for Applied and Translational Genomics (CATG), Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU), Dubai Health, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Background:
Many of the advanced MS methods applied in proteomics such as nanoflow LC-MS with data-independent acquisition have yet to be verified and/or optimized on metabolomics applications.
Research Design And Methods:
This study evaluates the feasibility of repurposing a proteomics-optimized nanoLC-MS platform for untargeted metabolomics. Using NIST SRM 1950 reference human plasma, we compared the performance of polarity switching and separate polarity modes under DIA conditions, focusing on metabolite coverage, annotation, and response linearity.
Results:
We observed, in the separate polarity and switching polarity runs 669 and 353 features in (+) mode and 558 and 446 features in (-) mode, respectively. A total of 233 metabolites were annotated using the (±) separate polarities and 179 using the (±) switching polarity based on MassBank of North America (MoNA) public MS library and filtered with the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). Both switching and separate polarity methods performed well regarding response linearities which were investigated by spiking some amino acid compounds into plasma matrix.
Conclusions:
The polarity switching DIA approach for metabolomics reduced sample consumption and analysis time, but led to fewer detected features and annotations compared to separate polarity runs. These findings support the use of unified nanoLC-MS platforms for integrated multi-omics analysis.
