TY - JOUR A1 - You, Yi A1 - Song, L. A1 - Young, M.D. A1 - van der Wielen, M. A1 - Evans-Nguyen, T. A1 - Riedel, Jens A1 - Shelley, J.T. T1 - Unsupervised Reconstruction of Analyte-Specific Mass Spectra Based on Time-Domain Morphology with a Modified Cross-Correlation Approach JF - Analytical Chemistry N2 - Concomitant species that appear at the same or very similar times in a mass-spectral analysis can clutter a spectrum because of the coexistence of many analyte-related ions (e.g., molecular ions, adducts, fragments). One method to extract ions stemming from the same origin is to exploit the chemical information encoded in the time domain, where the individual temporal appearances inside the complex structures of chronograms or chromatograms differ with respect to analytes. By grouping ions with very similar or identical time-domain structures, single-component mass spectra can be reconstructed, which are much easier to interpret and are library-searchable. While many other approaches address similar objectives through the Pearson’s correlation coefficient, we explore an alternative method based on a modified cross-correlation algorithm to compute a metric that describes the degree of similarity between features inside any two ion chronograms. Furthermore, an automatic workflow was devised to be capable of categorizing thousands of mass-spectral peaks into different groups within a few seconds. This approach was tested with direct mass-spectrometric analyses as well as with a simple, fast, and poorly resolved LC–MS analysis. Single-component mass spectra were extracted in both cases and were identified based on accurate mass and a mass-spectral library search. KW - Mass-Spectral Reconstruction KW - Mass Spectrometry KW - Correlation PY - 2021 DO - https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.0c04396 VL - 93 IS - 12 SP - 5009 EP - 5014 PB - ACS AN - OPUS4-52467 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -