Data Processing Thresholds for Abundance and Sparsity and Missed Biological Insights in an Untargeted Chemical Analysis of Blood Specimens for Exposomics.

ABSTRACT: Background: An untargeted chemical analysis of bio-fluids provides semi-quantitative data for thousands of chemicals for expanding our understanding about relationships among metabolic pathways, diseases, phenotypes and exposures. During the processing of mass spectral and chromatography data, various signal thresholds are used to control the number of peaks in the final data matrix that is used for statistical analyses. However, commonly used stringent thresholds generate constrained data matrices which may under-represent the detected chemical space, leading to missed biological insights in the exposome research. Methods: We have re-analyzed a liquid chromatography high resolution mass spectrometry data set for a publicly available epidemiology study (n = 499) of hum

SUBMITTER: Barupal DK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8222544 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature