Metabolomics methods

Metabolomics is the study of small metabolites present inside organisms, biofluids, cells, or tissue. These small molecules represent a wide variety of compounds with very different chemical and physical properties (such as boiling points, solubility, polarity, etc.). Furthermore, the metabolites are present in concentrations varying from nmol/L to mmol/L, which can make analysis extremely challenging. We offer a range of different methods, ranging from targeted methods that covers few preselected compounds, while others methods are broad and untargeted and can result in datasets with thousands of compounds.

Extraction of data and interpreting datasets for thousands of compounds can become labour intensive when looking at one metabolite at a time. MS-Omics applies advanced data extraction techniques to detect known as wells as unknown analytes in a dataset, before we apply data reduction techniques to elucidate patterns and connections. Depending on the study design, we typically apply both single- and multivariate statistics such as t-tests and principal component analysis (PCA) as a standard tool for large datasets, but we also provide other tools where applicable.