Abstract
In untargeted metabolomics approaches, the inability to structurally annotate relevant features and map them to
biochemical pathways is hampering the full exploitation of many metabolomics experiments. Furthermore, variable metabolic
content across samples result in sparse feature matrices that are statistically hard to handle. Here, we introduce MS2LDA+ that
tackles both above-mentioned problems. Previously, we presented MS2LDA, which extracts biochemically relevant molecular
substructures (“Mass2Motifs”) from a collection of fragmentation spectra as sets of co-occurring molecular fragments and neutral
losses, thereby recognizing building blocks of metabolomics. Here, we extend MS2LDA to handle multiple metabolomics
experiments in one analysis, resulting in MS2LDA+. By linking Mass2Motifs across samples, we expose the variability in
prevalence of structurally related metabolite families. We validate the differential prevalence of substructures between two distinct
samples groups and apply it to fecal samples. Subsequently, within one sample group of urines, we rank the Mass2Motifs based
on their variance to assess whether xenobiotic-derived substructures are among the most-variant Mass2Motifs. Indeed, we could
ascribe 22 out of the 30 most-variant Mass2Motifs to xenobiotic-derived substructures including paracetamol/acetaminophen
mercapturate and dimethylpyrogallol. In total, we structurally characterized 101 Mass2Motifs with biochemically or chemically
relevant substructures. Finally, we combined the discovered metabolite families with full scan feature intensity information to
obtain insight into core metabolites present in most samples and rare metabolites present in small subsets now linked through
their common substructures. We conclude that by biochemical grouping of metabolites across samples MS2LDA+ aids in
structural annotation of metabolites and guides prioritization of analysis by using Mass2Motif prevalence.
biochemical pathways is hampering the full exploitation of many metabolomics experiments. Furthermore, variable metabolic
content across samples result in sparse feature matrices that are statistically hard to handle. Here, we introduce MS2LDA+ that
tackles both above-mentioned problems. Previously, we presented MS2LDA, which extracts biochemically relevant molecular
substructures (“Mass2Motifs”) from a collection of fragmentation spectra as sets of co-occurring molecular fragments and neutral
losses, thereby recognizing building blocks of metabolomics. Here, we extend MS2LDA to handle multiple metabolomics
experiments in one analysis, resulting in MS2LDA+. By linking Mass2Motifs across samples, we expose the variability in
prevalence of structurally related metabolite families. We validate the differential prevalence of substructures between two distinct
samples groups and apply it to fecal samples. Subsequently, within one sample group of urines, we rank the Mass2Motifs based
on their variance to assess whether xenobiotic-derived substructures are among the most-variant Mass2Motifs. Indeed, we could
ascribe 22 out of the 30 most-variant Mass2Motifs to xenobiotic-derived substructures including paracetamol/acetaminophen
mercapturate and dimethylpyrogallol. In total, we structurally characterized 101 Mass2Motifs with biochemically or chemically
relevant substructures. Finally, we combined the discovered metabolite families with full scan feature intensity information to
obtain insight into core metabolites present in most samples and rare metabolites present in small subsets now linked through
their common substructures. We conclude that by biochemical grouping of metabolites across samples MS2LDA+ aids in
structural annotation of metabolites and guides prioritization of analysis by using Mass2Motif prevalence.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 7569-7577 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Analytical Chemistry |
| Volume | 89 |
| Issue number | 14 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Jul 2017 |