Hsu PC, Zhou B, Zhao Y, Ressom HW, Cheema AK, Pickworth W, Shields PG
Feasibility of identifying the tobacco-related global metabolome in blood by UPLC-QTOF-MS.
Journal of proteome research. 2012 Dec 17;
Metabolomics is likely an ideal tool to assess tobacco smoke exposure and the impact of cigarette smoke on human exposure and health. In order to assess reproducibility and feasibility of this by UPLC-QTOF-MS, three experiments were designed for the assessment of smokers' blood. Experiment I was an analysis of 8 smokers with 8 replicates. Experiment II was an analysis of 62 pooled quality control (QC) samples from 7 non-smokers' plasma placed as every tenth sample among a study of 613 samples from 160 smokers. Finally, in order to examine the feasibility of metabolomic study in assessing smoke exposure, Experiment III consisted of nine smokers and ten non-smokers' serum to evaluate differences of their global metabolome. There was minimal measurement and sample preparation variation in all experiments, although some caution is needed when analyzing specific parts of chromatogram. When assessing QC samples in the large scale study, QC clustering indicated high stability, reproducibility and consistency. Finally, in addition to the identification of nicotine metabololites as expected, there was a characteristic profile distinguishing smokers from non-smokers. Metabolites selected from putative identifications were verified by MSMS, showing the potential to identify metabolic phenotypes and new metabolites relating to cigarette smoke exposure and toxicity.