Isotopomer distribution computation from tandem mass spectrometric data with overlapping fragment spectra

We present a method for determination of the isotopomer distributions of metabolites from the data generated by a tandem mass spectrometer. The method is an improvement over existing method as it is able to deal with overlapping fragments in the spectra. Our experiments indicate that the new method surpasses its predecessors in separating isotopomers from each other. When using the daughter ion scanning (collision induced dissociation) mode, the method was shown to be able to constrain the isotopomer distribution of different amino acids better than two existing methods. In particular, the isotopomer distributions of three amino acids, glycine, alanine and serine, can be fully uncovered with the method. However, due to the imperfect fragmentation of molecules in the tandem mass spectrometer, isotopomer distributions of larger amino acids still cannot be fully uncovered. In tests with isotope-labelled alanine, most accurate results were obtained using multiple reaction monitoring and 15 eV collision energy. The meausured isotopomer frequecies were in the range 99-106% of the theoretical value and the deviation between repetitions was in the range 1-10%.