13C Isotope-Labeled Metabolomes Allowing for Improved Compound Annotation and Relative Quantification in Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-based Metabolomic Research

Metabolomics is rapidly becoming an integral part of many life science studies ranging from disease diagnostics to systems biology. However, a number of problems such as the discrimination of biological from non-biological signals, efficient compound annotation, and reliable quantification are still not satisfactorily solved in untargeted LC-MS-based metabolomics research. Extending our previous work on direct infusion-based metabolomics, we here describe a C-13 isotope labeling strategy in combination with an Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry-based approach (UPLC-FTICR MS) which provides a technological platform offering solutions to a number of the above-mentioned problems. We further demonstrate that the use of a fully labeled metabolome is not only beneficial for high end mass spectrometers, such as that used in this study but also provides a considerable improvement to every other mass spectrometry-based metabolomic platform.