Mathematical chromatography deciphers the molecular a of dissolved organic matter
Journal article, 2020

High-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) elucidates the molecular composition of dissolved organic matter (DOM) through the unequivocal assignment of molecular formulas. When HRMS is used as a detector coupled to high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), the molecular fingerprints of DOM are further augmented. However, the identification of eluting compounds remains impossible when DOM chromatograms consist of unresolved humps. Here, we utilized the concept of mathematical chromatography to achieve information reduction and feature extraction. Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC) was applied to a dataset describing the reverse-phase separation of DOM in headwater streams located in southeast Sweden. A dataset consisting of 1355 molecular formulas and 7178 mass spectra was reduced to five components that described 96.89% of the data. Each component summarized the distinct chromatographic elution of molecular formulas with different polarity. Component scores represented the abundance of the identified HPLC features in each sample. Using this chemometric approach allowed the identification of common patterns in HPLC–HRMS datasets by reducing thousands of mass spectra to only a few statistical components. Unlike in principal component analysis (PCA), components closely followed the analytical principles of HPLC–HRMS and therefore represented more realistic pools of DOM. This approach provides a wealth of new opportunities for unravelling the composition of complex mixtures in natural and engineered systems.

Author

Urban Wuensch

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Water Environment Technology

Jeffrey Hawkes

Uppsala University

The Analyst

0003-2654 (ISSN) 1364-5528 (eISSN)

Vol. 145 5 1789-1800

Enhancing biogeochemical Fingerprints of Natural Organic Matter with Data Fusion

ÅForsk (Agreement19-499), 2019-06-01 -- 2020-03-01.

Subject Categories

Pharmaceutical Sciences

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Analytical Chemistry

DOI

10.1039/C9AN02176K

PubMed

31950125

Related datasets

Mathematical chromatography deciphers the molecular fingerprints of dissolved organic matter [dataset]

DOI: 10.5061/dryad.nk98sf7pp

More information

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6/8/2020 8