Abstract
Breath is considered to be an easily accessible matrix, whose chemical composition relates to compounds present in blood. Therefore many metabolites are expected in exhaled breath, which may be used in the future for the development of diagnostic methods. In this article, a new strategy to discriminate between exhaled endogenous metabolites and exhaled exogenous contaminants by direct high-resolution mass spectrometry is introduced. The analysis of breath in real-time by secondary electrospray ionization mass spectrometry allows to interpret the origin of exhaled compounds. Exhaled metabolites that originate in the respiratory system show reproducible and significant patterns if plotted in real-time (>1 data point per second). An exhaled metabolite shows a signal that tends to rise at the end of a complete (forced) exhalation. In contrast, exogenous compounds, which may be present in room air, are gradually diluted by the air from the deeper lung and therefore show a trend of falling intensity. Signals found in breath by using this pattern recognition are linked to potential metabolites by comparison with online databases. In addition to this real-time approach, it is also shown how to combine this method with classical analytical methods in order to potentially identify unknown metabolites. Finally exhaled compounds following smoking a cigarette, chewing gum, or drinking coffee were investigated to underline the usefulness of this new approach.
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Abbreviations
- APCI:
-
Atmospheric pressure chemical ionization
- Da:
-
Dalton, molecular mass unit g/mol
- ECB:
-
Exhaled breath condensate
- EI-MS:
-
Electron impact mass spectrometry
- HMDB:
-
Human metabolite data base
- HPLC:
-
High performance liquid chromatography
- MS:
-
Mass spectrometry
- PTR-MS:
-
Proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry
- SESI:
-
Secondary electrospray ionization
- SIFT-MS:
-
Selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry
- SPME:
-
Solid phase micro extraction
- UPLC:
-
Ultra performance liquid chromatography
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for financial support (grant no. K-23K1-122264). Pablo Martinez-Lozano Sinues is acknowledged for critical review of the manuscript. Special thanks goes to the team from the Functional Genomics Center at the University Zürich for the access to their instrument.
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Berchtold, C., Meier, L., Steinhoff, R. et al. A new strategy based on real-time secondary electrospray ionization and high-resolution mass spectrometry to discriminate endogenous and exogenous compounds in exhaled breath. Metabolomics 10, 291–301 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-013-0568-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-013-0568-z