Suppression correction and characteristic study in liquid chromatography/Fourier transform mass spectrometry measurements

Analysis of peptide profiles from liquid chromatography/Fourier transform mass spectrometry (LC/FTMS) reveals a nonlinear distortion in intensity. Investigation of the measured C(13)/C(12) ratios comparing with theoretical ones shows that the nonlinearity can be attributed to signal suppression of low abundance peptide peaks. We find that the suppression is homogenous for different isotopes of identical peptides but non-homogenous for different peptides. We develop an iterative correction algorithm that corrects the intensity distortions for peptides with relatively high abundance. This algorithm can be applied in a wide range of applications using LC/FTMS. We also analyze the distortion characteristics of the instrument for lower abundance peptides, which should be considered when interpreting quantification results of LC/FTMS.