The combination of four analytical methods to explore skeletal muscle metabolomics: Better coverage of metabolic pathways or a marketing argument?

International audienceOBJECTIVES: Metabolomics is an emerging science based on diverse high throughput methods that are rapidly evolving to improve metabolic coverage of biological fluids and tissues. Technical progress has led researchers to combine several analytical methods without reporting the impact on metabolic coverage of such a strategy. The objective of our study was to develop and validate several analytical techniques (mass spectrometry coupled to gas or liquid chromatography and nuclear magnetic resonance) for the metabolomic analysis of small muscle samples and evaluate the impact of combining methods for more exhaustive metabolite covering.DESIGN AND METHODS: We evaluated the muscle metabolome from the same pool of mouse muscle samples after 2 metabolite extraction protocols. Four analytical methods were used: targeted flow injection analysis coupled with mass spectrometry (FIA-MS/MS), gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis. We evaluated the global variability of each compound i.e., analytical (from quality controls) and extraction variability (from muscle extracts). We determined the best extraction method and we reported the common and distinct metabolites identified based on the number and identity of the compounds detected with low analytical variability (variation coefficient