Quantitative metabolomics

Whenever accurate measurements of metabolite pools are necessary, we rely on targeted metabolomics by either LC-MS/MS, GC-TOF, or GC-MS depending on the analytes. The standard workflow for quantification of key intermediates of central carbon metabolism relies on ion pairing LC-MS/MS. This method allows to separate most isomers groups in central metabolism and yet offers a broad coverage of heterogeneous classes of compounds (i.e. organic acids, amino acids, sugar phosphates, nucleotides, CoA derivatives, etc). In parallel, we use various specialized methods for the analysis of special compounds which are hardly captured with general approaches. 

To ensure the highest standards of quality, we systematically employ isomeric ¹³C labeled internal standards for all analytes of interest. Precise and rapid quantification of hundreds of metabolites in hundreds of samples is ensured by own software that employs machine learning to robustly process real-life chromatographic traces without user supervision. Finally, quality of measurements is assessed by special software that checks for thermodynamic consistency of the whole data set.