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Towards Quality Assurance and Quality Control in Untargeted Metabolomics Studies
Citation:
Beger, R., W. Dunn, A. Bandukwala, B. Bethan, D. Broadhurst, C. Clish, S. Dasari, L. Derr, A. Evans, S. Fischer, T. Flynn, T. Hartung, D. Herrington, R. Higashi, P. Hsu, C. Jones, M. Kachman, H. Karuso, G. Kruppa, P. Maruvada, J. Mosley, I. Ntai, C. O’Donovan, M. Playdon, D. Raftery, D. Shaughnessy, A. Souza, T. Spaeder, B. Spalholz, F. Tayyari, B. Ubhi, M. Verma, T. Walk, I. Wilson, K. Witkin, D. Bearden, AND K. Zanetti. Towards Quality Assurance and Quality Control in Untargeted Metabolomics Studies. Metabolomics. Plenum Press, New York, NY, 15(4):1-5, (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-018-1460-7
Impact/Purpose:
This paper is a report out from a two day think tank event on QA and QC practices for nontargeted analysis metabolomic analysis. Following the inaugural meeting, the group has continued to be active, and ultimately established the Metabolomics Quality Assurance and Quality Control Consortium (mQACC). The establishment of the consortium will provide a structure for the Think Tank participants to not only continue these efforts, but expand them to include the broader metabolomics community.
Description:
We describe here the agreed upon first development steps and priority objectives of a community engagement effort to address current challenges in quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) in untargeted metabolomic studies. Metabolites have many important biological roles (for example, [1,2]) and the study of metabolites by advanced analytical and informatic platforms is defined as metabolomics. There are numerous sub-specialties in the field of metabolomics; for example, metabolomics investigations of drug response are often referred to as ‘pharmacometabolomics’. Two types of approaches can be applied depending on the study objectives, either discovery-based studies which have the objective to investigate hundreds or thousands of known and unknown metabolites to generate targets for further investigation, or targeted metabolomic studies which are focused on the investigation of a small subset of metabolites of known biological relevance. QA and QC processes are hugely important to ensure that the data acquired and reported in scientific publications and housed in data repositories are of high quality and are analytically reproducible. These processes relate to the procedures applied in preparation for data acquisition (QA) and during/after data acquisition (QC) (for example, [3]). QA processes include staff training, standard operating procedures, instrument maintenance and calibration, as well as other processes. QC processes include use of measured data from standard/certified reference materials and quality control samples to address the veracity of experimental data as well as other processes. For targeted studies, there is a long history of defined criteria for QA and QC processes, reporting of data quality for biological samples and standard reference materials and for assessment and reporting of data quality (for example, [4]). However, these criteria and biological samples are not routinely applied, are not available, or otherwise inappropriate for untargeted studies but are urgently required to enable the quality of these studies to be peer reviewed and accepted in the scientific community [5]. Without well-defined QA and QC procedures for untargeted metabolomics, harmonization across laboratories and multi-laboratory studies become nearly impossible.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Towards Quality Assurance and Quality Control in Untargeted Metabolomics Studies