CPVA: a web-based metabolomic tool for chromatographic peak visualization and annotation

Abstract

Motivation: Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based non-targeted metabolomics is routinely performed to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze a tremendous amount of metabolite signals in complex biological samples. However, false-positive peaks in the datasets are commonly detected as metabolite signals by using many popular software, resulting in non-reliable measurement.

Results: To reduce false-positive calling, we developed an interactive web tool, termed CPVA, for visualization and accurate annotation of the detected peaks in non-targeted metabolomics data. We used a chromatogram-centric strategy to unfold the characteristics of chromatographic peaks through visualization of peak morphology metrics, with additional functions to annotate adducts, isotopes and contaminants. CPVA is a free, user-friendly tool to help users to identify peak background noises and contaminants, resulting in decrease of false-positive or redundant peak calling, thereby improving the data quality of non-targeted metabolomics studies.

Availability and implementation: The CPVA is freely available at http://cpva.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com. Source code and installation instructions are available on GitHub: https://github.com/13479776/cpva.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.