Mass Spectrometry‐Driven Metabolomics for Metabolites and Metabolic Pathway Analysis

Metabolites are important indicators of physiological or pathological states, which can provide information for the identification of biomarkers for diseases and can help to understand its occurrence and progression. Metabolomics could lead to the identification of all the metabolites in a biological system. With technological advances, high-definition mass spectrometry (MS), coupled with pattern recognition approach, could obtain the comprehensive metabolic profiling and metabolic pathways from large biological data sets, which enables a great impact on discovering biomarkers and identifying perturbed pathways for diagnosing diseases and the response to treatment. It can be expected to result in enhanced understanding of disease mechanisms and has a strong potential for improving the early diagnosis of diseases. This chapter will highlight the importance and benefits with certain examples of MS-metabolomics for identifying potential biomarker metabolites and metabolic pathways and for gaining mechanistic insight into disease processes.