Invited Paper TM+AS-MoM8
Metabolite Annotation for Ultra-HR Imaging Mass Spectrometry: MS1 and Beyond

Monday, October 30, 2017, 10:40 am, Room 5 & 6

Metabolite imaging mass spectrometry promises to localize small molecules, metabolites, and lipids in tissues, microbial and cell cultures, and to interpret them in the context of cellular heterogeneity. However, just until recently the molecular interpretation of the big data generated by this technique was hampered by the lack of bioinformatics for metabolite identification. We recently developed and implemented a bioinformatics approach that allowed us to identify hundreds of metabolites from hundreds of datasets from various biological systems. We will present how this big data mining approach helps extract molecular knowledge from terabytes of imaging mass spectrometry data, find the link between metabolism and disease, and picture metabolites across hundreds of datasets.