New Advances in Separation Science for Metabolomics: Resolving Chemical Diversity in a Post-Genomic Era

Metabolomics offers a revolutionary framework for phenotyping individuals at a molecular level that is needed for new breakthroughs in cell biology and personalized medicine. Separation science plays several critical roles in metabolomics for reliable quantification and improved identification of metabolites in complex sample mixtures. Separation efficiency and peak capacity are two important parameters for determining the performance of a separation in terms of the total number of unique compounds that are baseline resolved prior to detection. Higher peak capacity within a wider separation window reduces solute coelution that can complicate relative quantification or spectral matching for unknown identification. The use of a wider bore/thicker nonpolar stationary phase film as the second dimension column enhances separation performance by increasing sample loadability that is important when quantifying low abundance metabolites in complex biological samples.