AccuCor2 Isotope Natural Abundance Correction for Dual-Isotope Tracer Experiments

Stable isotope labeling techniques have been widely applied in the field of metabolomics and proteomics. Before the measured mass spectrum data can be used for quantitative analysis, it must be accurately corrected for isotope natural abundance and tracer isotopic impurity. Despite the increasing popularity of dual-isotope tracing strategy such as ¹³C-¹⁵N or ¹³C-²H, there is no accurate tool for correcting isotope natural abundance for such experiments. Here, we present AccuCor2 as an R-based tool to perform the correction for ¹³C-¹⁵N or ¹³C-²H labeling experiments. Our results show that the dual-isotope experiments often require a mass resolution that is high enough to resolve ¹³C and ¹⁵N or ¹³C and ²H.Otherwise the labeling pattern is not solvable. However, this mass resolution may not be sufficiently high to resolve other non-tracer elements such as oxygen or sulfur from the tracer elements. Therefore, we design AccuCor2 to perform the correction based on the actual mass resolution of the measurements. Using both simulated and experimental data, we show that AccuCor2 performs accurate and resolution dependent correction for dual-isotope tracer data.