BACKGROUND: Since peak alignment in metabolomics has a huge effect on the subsequent statistical analysis, it is considered a key preprocessing step and many peak alignment methods have been developed. However, existing peak alignment methods do not produce satisfactory results. Indeed, the lack of accuracy results from the fact that peak alignment is done separately from another preprocessing step such as identification. Therefore, a post-hoc approach, which integrates both identification and alignment results, is in urgent need for the purpose of increasing the accuracy of peak alignment. RESULTS: The proposed post-hoc method was validated with three datasets such as a mixture of compound standards, metabolite extract from mouse liver, and metabolite extract from wheat. Compared to the existing methods, the proposed approach improved peak alignment in terms of various performance measures. Also, post-hoc approach was verified to improve peak alignment by manual inspection. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed approach, which combines the information of metabolite identification and alignment, clearly improves the accuracy of peak alignment in terms of several performance measures. R package and examples using a dataset are available at http://mrr.sourceforge.net/download.html.

BACKGROUND: Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GCxGC/TOF-MS) has been used for metabolite profiling in metabolomics. However, there is still much experimental variation to be controlled including both within-experiment and between-experiment variation. For efficient analysis, an ideal peak alignment method to deal with such variations is in great need. RESULTS: Using experimental data of a mixture of metabolite standards, we demonstrated that our method has better performance than other existing method which is not model-based. We then applied our method to the data generated from the plasma of a rat, which also demonstrates good performance of our model. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a model-based peak alignment method to process both homogeneous and heterogeneous experimental data. The unique feature of our method is the only model-based peak alignment method coupled with metabolite identification in an unified framework. Through the comparison with other existing method, we demonstrated that our method has better performance. Data are available at http://stage.louisville.edu/faculty/x0zhan17/software/software-development/mspa. The R source codes are available at http://www.biostat.iupui.edu/~ChangyuShen/CodesPeakAlignment.zip. TRIAL REGISTRATION: 2136949528613691.

MOTIVATION: Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC × GC-MS) brings much increased separation capacity, chemical selectivity and sensitivity for metabolomics and provides more accurate information about metabolite retention times and mass spectra. However, there is always a shift of retention times in the two columns that makes it difficult to compare metabolic profiles obtained from multiple samples exposed to different experimental conditions. RESULTS: The existing peak alignment algorithms for GC × GC-MS data use the peak distance and the spectra similarity sequentially and require predefined either distance-based window and/or spectral similarity-based window. To overcome the limitations of the current alignment methods, we developed an optimal peak alignment using a novel mixture similarity by employing the peak distance and the spectral similarity measures simultaneously without any variation windows. In addition, we examined the effect of the four different distance measures such as Euclidean, Maximum, Manhattan and Canberra distances on the peak alignment. The performance of our proposed peak alignment algorithm was compared with the existing alignment methods on the two sets of GC × GC-MS data. Our analysis showed that Canberra distance performed better than other distances and the proposed mixture similarity peak alignment algorithm prevailed against all literature reported methods. AVAILABILITY: The data and software mSPA are available at http://stage.louisville.edu/faculty/x0zhan17/software/software-development.

BACKGROUND: Mass spectrometry (MS) based metabolite profiling has been increasingly popular for scientific and biomedical studies, primarily due to recent technological development such as comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GCxGC/TOF-MS). Nevertheless, the identifications of metabolites from complex samples are subject to errors. Statistical/computational approaches to improve the accuracy of the identifications and false positive estimate are in great need. We propose an empirical Bayes model which accounts for a competing score in addition to the similarity score to tackle this problem. The competition score characterizes the propensity of a candidate metabolite of being matched to some spectrum based on the metabolite's similarity score with other spectra in the library searched against. The competition score allows the model to properly assess the evidence on the presence/absence status of a metabolite based on whether or not the metabolite is matched to some sample spectrum. RESULTS: With a mixture of metabolite standards, we demonstrated that our method has better identification accuracy than other four existing methods. Moreover, our method has reliable false discovery rate estimate. We also applied our method to the data collected from the plasma of a rat and identified some metabolites from the plasma under the control of false discovery rate. CONCLUSIONS: We developed an empirical Bayes model for metabolite identification and validated the method through a mixture of metabolite standards and rat plasma. The results show that our hierarchical model improves identification accuracy as compared with methods that do not structurally model the involved variables. The improvement in identification accuracy is likely to facilitate downstream analysis such as peak alignment and biomarker identification. Raw data and result matrices can be found at http://www.biostat.iupui.edu/~ChangyuShen/index.htm. TRIAL REGISTRATION: 2123938128573429.