Metabolic Phenotyping Using Atmospheric Pressure Gas Chromatography-MS

Atmospheric pressure GC (APGC) is a soft chemical ionization technique that generates a mass spectrum in which there is minimal fragmentation and conservation of the molecular ion. Additionally, when APGC is combined with a time of flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS) for exact mass MSE analysis, comprehensive precursor and fragment ion spectral data is obtained for every detectable component in a complex sample. GC-MSE offers a simple route to providing high selectivity and confidence for simultaneous identification and quantitation in a single analysis. This application note reports an APGC-TOF MSE profiling approach and its application to metabolic fingerprinting of Arabidopsis.