Combining Mass Spectrometry and NMR Improves Metabolite Detection and Annotation

Authors

Fatema Bhinderwala, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Nishikant Wase, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Concetta DiRusso, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Robert Powers, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

11-2018

Citation

Published in final edited form as: J Proteome Res. 2018 November 02; 17(11): 4017–4022. doi:10.1021/acs.jproteome.8b00567.

Comments

HHS Public Access Author manuscript J Proteome Res. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2019 November 02.

Abstract

Despite inherent complementarity, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS) are routinely separately employed to characterize metabolomics samples. More troubling is the erroneous view that metabolomics is better served by exclusively utilizing MS. Instead, we demonstrate the importance of combining NMR and MS for metabolomics by using small chemical compound-treatments of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as an illustrative example. A total of 102 metabolites were detected (82 by GC-MS, 20 by NMR and 22 by both techniques). Out of these 47 metabolites of interest were identified, where 14 metabolites were uniquely identified by NMR and 16 metabolites were uniquely identified by GC-MS. A total of 17 metabolites were identified by both NMR and GC-MS. In general, metabolites identified by both techniques exhibited similar changes upon compound treatment. In effect, NMR identified key metabolites that were missed by MS and enhanced the overall coverage of the oxidative pentose phosphate pathway, Calvin cycle, tricarboxylic acid cycle and amino acid biosynthetic pathways that informed on pathway activity in central carbon metabolism leading to fatty acid and complex lipid synthesis. Our study emphasizes a prime advantage of combining multiple analytical techniques - an improved detection and annotation of metabolites.