Chemometric strategies in analysis of chromatographic-mass spectrometry data

The coupling of chromatography and mass spectrometry (MS) provides a powerful tool for the chemical analysis of complex matrices [1-3]. The most common analytical techniques used in the separation step are gas chromatography (GC), liquid chromatography (LC), and capillary electrophoresis (CE) [4-12]. GC-MS allows the separation of volatile and semivolatile compounds, LC-MS is used for nonvolatile compounds with higher molecular weight, both polar and nonpolar, while CE is mainly used for polar, charged analytes. Nowadays, these techniques are routinely used in many fields such as clinical biochemistry [13-15], pharmacy [16], food science [17], environmental analyses [6,18], toxicology [19,20], and forensics [21,22], to list a few.