genuMet

genuMet identifies genuine metabolic features and discriminates measurement artifacts in untargeted metabolomics datasets lacking pooled quality control (QC) samples by analyzing missing-value patterns across sample injection order.

Key Features:

• Post-alignment quality control: Operates after initial feature alignment to evaluate features for potential measurement artifacts.
• Injection order utilization: Leverages the sequence of biological sample injections to detect systematic artifact patterns.
• Operation without pooled QC samples: Designed to control measurement artifacts in studies that do not include pooled quality control (QC) samples.
• Performance metrics: With appropriate parameter settings achieves over a 95% true negative rate and an 85% true positive rate.

Scientific Applications:

• Untargeted metabolomics quality control: Improves the identification of genuine metabolic signals in untargeted mass spectrometry datasets.
• Large-scale cohort studies: Enables artifact detection in studies with many biological samples where pooled QC is not available.
• Discovery of novel metabolic features: Reduces false positives to support more reliable detection and downstream interpretation of putative novel metabolites.

Methodology:

Post-alignment analysis of missing-value patterns across the injection order of biological samples to distinguish true metabolic features from artifacts.