Data processing in metabolic fingerprinting by CE-UV: Application to urine samples from autistic childrenMetabolic fingerprinting of biofluids such as urine can be used to detect and analyse differences between individuals. However, before pattern recognition methods can be utilised for classification, preprocessing techniques for the denoising, baseline removal, normalisation and alignment of electropherograms must be applied. Here a MEKC method using diode array detection has been used for high-resolution separation of both charged and neutral metabolites. Novel and generic algorithms have been developed for use prior to multivariate data analysis. Alignment is achieved by combining the use of reference peaks with a method that uses information from multiple wavelengths to align electropherograms to a reference signal. This metabolic fingerprinting approach by MEKC has been applied for the first time to urine samples from autistic and control children in a nontargeted and unbiased search for markers for autism. Although no biomarkers for autism could be determined using MEKC data here, the general approach presented could also be applied to the processing of other data collected by CE with UV-Vis detection.
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IntroductionMetabolic fingerprinting approaches [1] have recently emerged as a nonbiased alternative to the determination of individual levels of a specific metabolite or class of metabolites in large sets of samples, as is necessary for clinical diagnosis purposes. 1 H-NMR has been widely used in urinary fingerprinting and the search for disease biomarkers [2,3]. The approach has been recently complemented by chromatographic techniques hyphenated to MS (GC-MS and LC-MS), with the advantage over 1 H-NMR of a higher sensitivity [4][5][6][7]. Other spectroscopic techniques used less frequently for urinary fingerprinting include direct injection MS [8,9] and FTIR spectroscopy [10]. CE has recently been incorporated to the family of metabolic fingerprinting techniques used for clinical studies [11][12][13][14]. CE is an efficient and sensitive high-resolution separation technique that allows fast analysis of ionic species and the use of small samples.MEKC, applicable to both ionic and neutral species, has proved to be a useful tool in the study of different target metabolites in urine [15][16][17][18]. However, its application as a nontargeted approach has not yet been fully exploited. CD-modified MEKC allows the separation of over 80 UVabsorbing endogenous analytes of different charge types (neutral, anionic and cationic) below 25 min [18][19][20]. Since minimal sample pretreatment is required, this methodology has the potential for high-throughput analysis of the large number of samples required in screening applications.Urinary fingerprints produced by MEKC are highly complex datasets and require multivariate techniques for interpretation. Unsupervised pattern recognition methods such as cluster analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) have been used to examine the structure of these dataset...