Inside the Personalized Medicine Toolbox: GCxGC-Mass Spectrometry for High-Throughput Profiling...

Inside the Personalized Medicine Toolbox: GCxGC-Mass Spectrometry for High-Throughput Profiling of the Human Plasma Metabolome

Personalized medicine advocates have been frustrated by the issue of analyte component resolution in biomolecular profiling. Because complex human biological samples such as plasma, serum, or urine contain ~103–107 unique molecular entities, the analyte capacity of any high-throughput platform is typically exceeded. In our attempt to overcome this problem, we employed the use of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) combined with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) for high-throughput profiling of the human plasma metabolome. The profiling experiments demonstrated the capability of a GC×GC-TOF-MS approach with regard to component resolution as well as overall utility for comparative metabolomic analyses employing plasma samples from a "control" cohort (81 samples) versus a cardiovascular-compromised cohort (15 samples) of individuals.