From 1994 to the present the Siuzdak lab has been working on activity
metabolomics. using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to identify metabolites that alter phenotype. Later, he and his collaborators provided the first example of a whole intact virus (
tobacco mosaic virus) being mass measured using a charge detection mass spectrometer, an instrument designed by Henry Benner and Stephen Fuerstenau at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. In 1999, the Siuzdak lab described the use of nanostructures to enhance desorption/ionization on
porous silicon of small molecules (
DIOS), this is also known as the first surface-based example of surface-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (SALDI-MS). This technology went on to be expanded using fluorinated initiator molecules used within the porous silicon and was described as Na
nostructure Initiator Mass Spectrometry (NIMS)
, it is also known as Nanostructure Imaging Mass Spectrometry (NIMS) because of its expanded application to imaging. In 2005, the Siuzdak lab was engaged in identifying dysregulated metabolic peaks from
liquid chromatography mass spectrometry data sets, to address the issue retention time alignment they developed the first algorithm that allowed for the nonlinear alignment of metabolomics data called
XCMS. From the early 2000s to the present, the Siuzdak lab created and has been expanding the tandem mass spectrometry database known as
METLIN.
METLIN is made up solely of experimental data generated from high resolution tandem mass spectrometry instrumentation, all of the data is derived from molecular standards. METLIN (as of May 2025) has over 960,000 molecular standards with experimental tandem mass spectrometry data.
METLIN is unique with respect to its size, as other databases are over an order of magnitude smaller, and
METLIN, to facilitate the fragmentation, identification, and quantification (via Q-MRM) of molecules without the use of tandem mass spectrometry. And uMRM to facility MRM generation after removal of isotopes and in-source fragments, all without the us of authentic standards. == References ==