Free chromatogram viewer and alignment tool

The two most commonly used alignment algorithms are correlation optimized warping (COW) (Nielsen et al., 1998 Tomasi et al., 2004) and dynamic time warping (DTW) (Tomasi et al., 2004) that focus only on the comprehensive optimal solution only, and failed on chromatograms with large peak shifts as commonly seen in capillary electrophoresis (CE). However, current alignment tools cannot be applied to such data sets. Due to the high instrumental cost of mass spectrometry, many laboratories use UV and fluorescence detectors for signal detection. For the reasonable chemometric analysis with chromatograms, specifically the fingerprint analysis of plant extracts (Cianchino et al., 2007) or metabolomics analysis (Nordstrom et al., 2006), certain known peaks, as the key chromatogram features, should be aligned together before any statistical treatment.Д¬urrent publicly available tools for chromatogram alignment such as ChromA (Hoffmann and Stoye, 2009), VIPER (Monroe et al., 2007) and Metalign (Lommen, 2009) are designed for chromatographic technique coupled to mass spectrometers. It is important to correct the retention time shits before chemometric analysis of a chromatographic data. Retention time shifts in chromatograms may be originated from variation in flow rate, temperature and column aging of the chromatographic system (Christin et al., 2008).

Most samples used for fingerprint analysis and metabolomics are composed of a large number of diverse components and slight retention time shifts could result in the incorrect detection of differences between pre-classified samples.

Fingerprint analysis (Cianchino et al., 2007) and metabolomics (Nordstrom et al., 2006) are two rapid growing research fields that use the entire chromatogram for authentication of herbal medicine, clinical diagnostic and evaluation of drug toxicity or efficacy.

With the improvement of chromatographic technology and chemometric analysis, there is a growing interest to use the entire chromatogram to detect differences between pre-classified sample sets. Chromatography is the most important separation technique.

Free chromatogram viewer and alignment tool