Agilent Announces MassHunter Metabolite ID Software for the Study of Metabolism in Biological Systems

Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced plans to launch MassHunter Metabolite ID software, the newest member of its MassHunter Workstation software suite.

Available by August, this software will enhance productivity for researchers involved in metabolite identification, which is the study of modifications that pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals undergo in biological systems.

“The new MassHunter Metabolite ID software now exploits the industry-leading sensitivity, acquisition speed and mass accuracy of the Agilent 6510 Q-TOF LC/MS system for the identification of metabolites,” said Agilent’s Frank Kuhlmann, software product marketing manager, LC/MS.

“Combined with the Q-TOF, the compound-centric data mining and navigation features of the Metabolite ID software offer unprecedented productivity and confidence in the identification of metabolites,” Kuhlmann added.

Agilent has designed the MassHunter Metabolite ID software with following features:

• an easy-to-use interface that displays all information at a glance;

• an integrated workflow, from acquisition through reporting;

• the combination of multiple algorithms to increase confidence in the identification of both expected and unexpected metabolites;

• a powerful sample/control comparison based on Agilent’s molecular feature extraction (MFE) algorithm, which reliably detects all metabolites;

• a new molecular formula generation (MFG) algorithm that uses both MS and MS/MS accurate mass information to reduce the number of potential molecular formulas for each metabolite;

• a customizable mass defect filter (MDF) to find metabolites selectively;

• confirmation of metabolites via MS/MS spectral correlation using the Novatia Autoshift algorithm, which helps determine the location of biotransformations in each metabolite; and

• comprehensive custom reporting via Microsoft® Excel 2003.