Improving Metabolite Identification with DecoID for Database-Assisted Deconvolution of Metabolomic MS/MS Spectra

Chimeric MS/MS spectra contain fragments from multiple precursor ions and therefore hinder compound identification in metabolomics. Historically, deconvolution of these chimeric spectra has been challenging and relied upon specific experimental methods that introduce variation in the ratios of precursor ions between multiple MS/MS scans. DecoID introduces a complementary, method-independent approach where database spectra are computationally mixed to match an experimentally acquired spectrum using LASSO regression. When applied to human plasma, DecoID increased the number of identified metabolites by over 30%.