Friday, March 16, 2012

Review about bioinformatic tools for metabolomics

follow-up to my last posting: Today I was reading the review below and I found it amusing to read this:
"... However, the relatively low sensitivity of NMR, and the spectral overlap that often occurs, limits the number and variety of metabolites than can be simultaneously observed. Hyphenated mass spectrometry (MS) methods, such as GC-MS, LC-MS, and CE-MS, currently provide higher sensitivity, and are the leading analytical platform for metabolite profiling."

Bioinformatics Tools for Mass Spectroscopy-Based Metabolomic Data Processing and Analysis
Sugimoto, Masahiro; Kawakami, Masato; Robert, Martin; Soga, Tomoyoshi; Tomita, Masaru
Current Bioinformatics, Volume 7, Number 1, March 2012 , pp. 96-108(13)

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

"Slightly" biased review

Metabolomics of sepsis-induced acute lung injury: a new approach for biomarkers
Paige Lacy
Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol. 2011 Jan;300(1):L1-3. Epub 2010 Nov 5.

"... In particular, NMR is widely used for “classic” metabolic studies, because this approach has an exceptional capacity to rapidly identify and quantify multiple metabolites in biological fluids. Other approaches involving mass spectrometry are limited in their ability to identify more than a few small molecules in complex mixtures and are unable to quantify metabolites accurately."

For a review, I think this is a more than questionable statement.