Some lessons learned on the impact of the storage conditions, syringe wash solvent, and the way of GC-MS injection on the reproducibility of metabolomic studies - MeOH

In this research, we successfully obtained good repeatability for the peak areas of 29 core blood plasma metabolites. Six different strategies of storage and injection were investigated and evaluated for the reproducibility of obtained data. Our GC-MS results demonstrated that the combinationof pyridine as a syringe wash solvent and three injections from same vial was the most appropriate for minimizing the coefficient of variation (CV) of the results obtained. At the same time, storage of samples does not have a noticeable effect on the change in the areas of metabolites, although it reduces CV in some cases. These storage and injection recommendations can be used in future study protocols for the GC×GC-MS analysis of blood plasma.