Quartet metabolite reference materials for inter-laboratory proficiency test and data integration of metabolomics profiling

As part of the Quartet Project, we extracted metabolites from four immortalized B-lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from a Chinese quartet family to provide a publicly available suite of metabolite reference materials. Each aliquot contains dried metabolite extracts from approximately 10⁶ cells, suitable for evaluating metabolomics analysis including chromatography separation, mass spectrometry detection, and data processing.In the current study, we generated 264 metabolomic profiles from different laboratories using targeted and untargeted strategies to assess inter-laboratory proficiency. Quantification was done by relative abundance for untargeted techniques and multiple reaction monitoring for targeted techniques, except one lab (T-L4) which used standard curves.