Comparison of Multivariate ANOVA-Based Approaches for the Determination of Relevant Variables in Experimentally Designed Metabolomic Studies.

The use of chemometric methods based on the analysis of variances (ANOVA) allows evaluation of the statistical significance of the experimental factors used in a study. However, classical multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) has a number of requirements that make it impractical for dealing with metabolomics data. For this reason, in recent years, different options have appeared that overcome these limitations. In this work, we evaluate the performance of three of these multivariate ANOVA-based methods (ANOVA simultaneous component analysis-ASCA, regularized MANOVA-rMANOVA, and Group-wise ANOVA-simultaneous component analysis-GASCA) in the framework of metabolomics studies. Our main goals are to compare these various ANOVA-based approaches and evaluate their performance on experimentally designed metabolomic studies to find the significant factors and identify the most relevant variables (potential markers) from the obtained results. Two experimental data sets were generated employing liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS) with different complexity in the design to evaluate the performance of the statistical approaches. Results show that the three considered ANOVA-based methods have a similar performance in detecting statistically significant factors. However, relevant variables pointed by GASCA seem to be more reliable as there is a strong similarity with those variables detected by the widely used partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) method.

Quantification strategies for two-dimensional liquid chromatography datasets using regions of interest and multivariate curve resolution approaches.

In this work, three chemometrics-based approaches are compared for quantification purposes when using two-dimensional liquid chromatography (LC×LC-MS), taking as a study case the quantification of amino acids in commercial drug mixtures. Although the approaches have been already used for one-dimensional gas or liquid chromatography, the main novelty of this work is the demonstration of their applicability to LC×LC-MS datasets. Besides, steps such as peak alignment and modelling, commonly applied in this type of data analysis, are not required with the approaches proposed here. In a first step, regions of interest (ROI) strategy is used for the spectral compression of the LC×LC-MS datasets. Then the first strategy consists of building a calibration curve from the areas obtained in this ROI compression step. Alternatively, the ROI intensity matrices can be used as input for a second analysis step employing the multivariate curve resolution alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) method. The main benefit of MCR-ALS is the resolution of elution and spectral profiles for each of the analytes in the mixture, even in the case of strong coelutions and high signal overlapping. Classical MCR-ALS based calibration curve from the peak areas resolved only applying non-negativity constraints (second strategy) is compared to the results obtained when an area correlation constraint is imposed during the ALS optimization (third strategy). All in all, similar quantification results were achieved by the three approaches but, especially in prediction studies, the more accurate quantification is obtained when the calibration curve is built from the peak areas obtained with MCR-ALS when the area correlation constraint is imposed.