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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as: Curr Protoc Mol Biol. 2016 Apr 1;114:30.4.1–30.4.32. doi: 10.1002/0471142727.mb3004s114

Figure 4. Quality control of system suitability of GC/MS metabolomics using a mixture of reference compounds: amino acid trimethylsilylation.

Figure 4

Top panel: Quantification ion traces are given for several amino acids with respect to a simple keto-acid (alpha-ketoglutarate) and C12 FAME internal standard that is not compromised by varying efficiency of trimethylsilylations. Note that C12 FAME (m/z 87) and the quantification ion m/z 232 for tri-TMS-aspartate are both displayed at five-fold reduced signal intensity. Some amino acids such as asparagine are more subject to injector discrimination by failing trimethylsilylation robustness than other amino acids, such as aspartate. Displaying different amino acids along with a keto-acid and the C12 FAME standard can therefore serve for visual QC monitoring.

Lower panel: mass spectra for these QC reference metabolites.