A mass spectrometric technique, laser electrospray mass spectrometry, with multivariate statistical analysis is used to discriminate eight phenotypes from a single plant tissue class and to find potential biomarkers. Direct analysis of flower petals is enabled with this ambient pressure mass spectrometry technique, which combines an intense femtosecond laser pulse for nonresonant vaporization of molecules from the tissue surface and electrospray ionization for postionization of the neutral vaporized molecules. Mass spectral signatures allowed the discrimination of various phenotypes that was performed using principal component analysis (PCA) and either linear discriminant analysis (LDA) or K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifiers. Cross validation was performed using multiple training sets to evaluate the predictive ability of the classifiers, which showed 93.7% and 96.8% overall accuracies for LDA and KNN, respectively. Significant mass spectral features were extracted using PCA loading plots, demonstrating the ability to discover potential biomarkers from direct analysis of tissue samples.

Differentiation of eight phenotypes and discovery of potential biomarkers for a single tissue class using laser electrospray mass spectrometry and multivariate statistical analysis

244th National Meeting (2012)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.