Abstract
Technical improvement and optimization of analytical conditions for mass spectrometry enabled to detect many metabolites with high-throughput and high-resolution. However, using a single system like GC-MS can not lead a comprehensive analysis against all metabolites that have diverse chemical nature. Therefore, RIKEN metabolomics research group uses various analytical systems, such as GC-TOF/MS, LC-TOF/MS, and CE-TOF/MS, for detecting as many metabolites as possible. In these instruments, we use CE-TOF/MS system. CE-TOF/MS can perform the high resolution analysis for ionic compounds quantitatively. First, we have analyzed standard compounds using three methods to detect cations, anions, and nucleotides, and then identified 129 standard compounds based on their migration times and their detected m/z values. In analyses of Arabidopsis extracts, we could quantify 48 known metabolites and detect 3332 unknown peaks. We now analyze other standard compounds to increase the number of quantifiable metabolites. Moreover, we perform metabolic profiling analysis toward the Arabidopsis mutants.
