Kate Yu | Authors

Non-targeted metabolite profiling by ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (UHPLC–MS) is a powerful technique to investigate the influence of genetic and environmental influence on metabolic phenotype in plants. The approach offers an unbiased and in-depth analysis that can reveal molecular markers of desirable phenotypic traits which can be complementary to genetic markers in plant breeding efforts. Here, the power of non-targeted metabolite profiling is illustrated in a study focused on the determination of molecular markers in malting barley that are predictive of desirable malting quality for brewing applications.

The use of a mass spectrometer in quantitative analysis exploits its exquisite selectivity and sensitivity as a detector, allowing a signal to be ascribed to a particular chemical entity with high certainty, even when present in a sample at a low concentration. There are, however, some special considerations that are necessary when a mass spectrometer is used as a quantitative tool.

The quantification of proteins in a complex biological sample is an important and challenging task. Mass spectrometry (MS) is increasingly used for this purpose, not only to give a global survey of the components and their amounts, but also to precisely and accurately quantify specific target proteins.

In this article, we discuss radical MS, an increasingly important area of MS development and the application to bioanalysis. At the current stage, most of the research is performed by a small set of academic groups; it is likely that these types of fundamental studies will attract more attention and even be commercialized in the near future.

The potential to accurately and rapidly measure hundreds of individual molecular species provides novel opportunities for food science and nutrition. For food and nutrition researchers, metabolomics, the screening of small-molecule metabolites, enables the molecular fingerprinting of food components. This article describes the various applications, strategies, and tools related to metabolomics in food analysis.

Correlating biological activity with chemical composition is the Holy Grail of natural product chemists. Is mass spectrometry the right tool for this challenge?