Abstract
Real-time breath analysis by high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) is a promising method to noninvasively retrieve relevant biochemical information. In this work, we conducted a head-to-head comparison of two ionization techniques: Secondary electrospray ionization (SESI) and plasma ionization (PI), for the analysis of exhaled breath. Two commercially available SESI and PI sources were coupled to the same HRMS device to analyze breath of two healthy individuals in a longitudinal study. We analyzed 58 breath specimens in both platforms, leading to 2,209 and 2,296 features detected by SESI-HRMS and by PI-HRMS, respectively. 60% of all the mass spectral features were detected in both platforms. However, remarkable differences were noted in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), whereby the median (interquartile range, IQR) S/N ratio for SESI-HRMS was 115 (IQR = 408), whereas for PI-HRMS it was 5 (IQR = 5). Differences in the mass spectral profiles for the same samples make the inter-comparability of both techniques problematic. Overall, we conclude that both techniques are excellent for real-time breath analysis because of the very rich mass spectral fingerprints. However, further work is needed to fully understand the exact metabolic insights one can gather using each of these platforms.
Highlights
We further considered mass spectral features detected in at least 30% of the samples for each set of experiments done with Secondary electrospray ionization (SESI) and plasma ionization (PI)
3.2 Real-time Breath Analysis After the analysis of 58 breath samples from the two subjects, we found a similar number of mass spectral features for both techniques: 2,206 for SESI-high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS), and 2,296 for PI-HRMS
We have compared for the first time the performance of two commercially available PI-HRMS and SESI-HRMS systems for real-time analysis of human breath
Summary
Human breath contains a wealth of metabolic information with translational potential.[1]. One success story in this context is fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO), which is measured routinely to assess airway inflammation and to guide treatment therapy.[2]. Despite the obvious attractiveness of breath analysis, just a handful of clinical breath tests are available. For this reason, further research, instrumentation development and clinical validations are needed to fully exploit the potential of breath analysis. Secondary electrospray ionization – high-resolution mass spectrometry (SESI-HRMS) is a powerful tool for volatile organic compound analysis.[1,3]. SESI-HRMS allows for real-time breathprinting by detection of trace metabolites without any sample pretreatment. Atmospheric pressure gas-phase ion chemistry via ion switching plays a fundamental role.[4]
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