Combining rapid 2D NMR experiments with novel pre-processing workflows and MIC quality measures for metabolomics

Introduction The use of 2D NMR data sources (COSY in this paper) allows to reach general metabolomics results which are at least as good as the results obtained with 1D NMR data, and this with a less advanced and less complex level of preprocessing. But a major issue still exists and can largely slow down a generalized use of 2D data sources in metabolomics: the experiment duration. Objective The goal of this paper is to overcome the experiment duration issue in our recently published MIC strategy by considering faster 2D COSY acquisition techniques: a conventional COSY with a reduced number of transients and the use of the Non-Uniform Sampling (NUS) method. These faster alternatives are all submitted to novel 2D pre-processing workflows and to Metabolomic Informative Content analyses. Eventually, results are compared to those obtained with conventional COSY spectra. Methods To pre-process the 2D data sources, the Global Peak List (GPL) workflow and the Vectorization workflow are used. To compare this data sources and to detect the more informative one(s), MIC (Metabolomic Informative Content) indexes are used, based on clustering and inertia measures of quality. Results Results are discussed according to a multi-factor experimental design (which is unsupervised and based on human urine samples). Descriptive PCA results and MIC indexes are shown, leading to the direct and objective comparison of the different data sets. Conclusion In conclusion, it is demonstrated that conventional COSY spectra recorded with only one transient per increment and COSY spectra recorded with 50% of non-uniform sampling provide very similar MIC results as the initial COSY recorded with four transients, but in a much shorter time. Consequently, using techniques like the reduction of the number of transients or NUS can really open the door to a potential high-throughput use of 2D COSY spectra in metabolomics.