SERMACS Session on NTA Data Analysis Workflows

The following session will be held at the South East Regional Meeting of ACS in Durham, North Carolina, October 25-28, 2023:

Title: Data Analysis Workflows for Non Targeted Analysis Studies

Chairs: Alex Chao, Antony Williams

Description: Increasingly, chemical monitoring and characterization studies are shifting towards high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) based non-targeted analysis (NTA, also called untargeted analysis or non-targeted screening) approaches which allow discovery of a greater scope of chemicals than traditional targeted methods. By their very nature, NTA approaches generate orders of magnitude greater amounts of chemical feature data; in order to identify the most significant and relevant chemicals present, researchers may perform post-acquisition analyses on NTA data, often via automated methods. These analyses range from retrieving chemical analytical data, metadata, and quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSPR) predictions to support chemical identifications, to performing statistical analyses and/or combining data from parallel studies to support prioritization of chemical features. Topics of interest for this session include (but are not limited to): software analyses, chemical databases, chromatography and spectral predictions, statistical analyses, prioritization of features, machine learning analyses, multi-study data integration (i.e., geospatial, temporal, metabolomics, lipidomics, genomics, transcriptomics, etc.), and applications of approaches on real world NTA data.