Package: MetaboCoreUtils
Authors: Johannes Rainer [aut, cre] (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6977-7147), Michael Witting [aut] (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1462-4426)
Last modified: 2021-05-19 15:26:15
Compiled: Wed May 19 18:03:58 2021

1 Introduction

The MetaboCoreUtils defines metabolomics-related core functionality provided as low-level functions to allow a data structure-independent usage across various R packages. This includes functions to calculate between ion (adduct) and compound mass-to-charge ratios and masses or functions to work with chemical formulas. The package provides also a set of adduct definitions and information on some commercially available internal standard mixes commonly used in MS experiments.

For a full list of function, see

library("MetaboCoreUtils")
ls(pos = "package:MetaboCoreUtils")
##  [1] "addElements"              "adductNames"             
##  [3] "adducts"                  "containsElements"        
##  [5] "countElements"            "internalStandardMixNames"
##  [7] "internalStandards"        "mass2mz"                 
##  [9] "mz2mass"                  "pasteElements"           
## [11] "standardizeFormula"       "subtractElements"

or the reference page on the package webpage.

2 Installation

The package can be installed with the BiocManager package. To install BiocManager use install.packages("BiocManager") and, after that, BiocManager::install("MetaboCoreUtils") to install this package.

3 Examples

The functions defined in this package utilise basic classes with the aim of being reused in packages that provide a more formal, high-level interface.

The examples below demonstrate the basic usage of the functions from the package.

library(MetaboCoreUtils)

3.1 Conversion between ion m/z and compound masses

The mass2mz and mz2mass functions allow to convert between compound masses and ion (adduct) mass-to-charge ratios (m/z). The MetaboCoreUtils package provides definitions of common ion adducts generated by electrospray ionization (ESI). These can be listed with the adductNames function.

adductNames()
##  [1] "[M+3H]3+"          "[M+2H+Na]3+"       "[M+H+Na2]3+"      
##  [4] "[M+Na3]3+"         "[M+2H]2+"          "[M+H+NH4]2+"      
##  [7] "[M+H+K]2+"         "[M+H+Na]2+"        "[M+C2H3N+2H]2+"   
## [10] "[M+2Na]2+"         "[M+C4H6N2+2H]2+"   "[M+C6H9N3+2H]2+"  
## [13] "[M+H]+"            "[M+Li]+"           "[M+2Li-H]+"       
## [16] "[M+NH4]+"          "[M+H2O+H]+"        "[M+Na]+"          
## [19] "[M+CH4O+H]+"       "[M+K]+"            "[M+C2H3N+H]+"     
## [22] "[M+2Na-H]+"        "[M+C3H8O+H]+"      "[M+C2H3N+Na]+"    
## [25] "[M+2K-H]+"         "[M+C2H6OS+H]+"     "[M+C4H6N2+H]+"    
## [28] "[2M+H]+"           "[2M+NH4]+"         "[2M+Na]+"         
## [31] "[2M+K]+"           "[2M+C2H3N+H]+"     "[2M+C2H3N+Na]+"   
## [34] "[3M+H]+"           "[M+H-NH3]+"        "[M+H-H2O]+"       
## [37] "[M+H-Hexose-H2O]+" "[M+H-H4O2]+"       "[M+H-CH2O2]+"

With that we can use the mass2mz function to calculate the m/z for a set of compounds assuming the generation of certain ions. In the example below we define masses for some theoretical compounds and calculate their expected m/z assuming that ions "[M+H]+" and "[M+Na]+" are generated.

masses <- c(123, 842, 324)
mass2mz(masses, adduct = c("[M+H]+", "[M+Na]+"))
##        [M+H]+  [M+Na]+
## [1,] 124.0073 145.9892
## [2,] 843.0073 864.9892
## [3,] 325.0073 346.9892

As a result we get a matrix with each row representing one compound and each column the m/z for one of the defined adducts. With the mz2mass we could perform the reverse calculation, i.e. from m/z to compound masses.

3.2 Working with chemical formulas

The lack of consistency in the format in which chemical formulas are written poses a big problem comparing formulas coming from different resources. The MetaboCoreUtils package provides functions to standardize formulas as well as combine formulas or substract elements from formulas. Below we use an artificial example to show this functionality. First we standardize a chemical formula with the standardizeFormula function.

frml <- "Na3C4"
frml <- standardizeFormula(frml)
frml
## [1] "C4Na3"

Next we add "H2O" to the formula using the addElements function.

frml <- addElements(frml, "H2O")
frml
## [1] "C4H2ONa3"

We can also substract elements with the subtractElements function:

frml <- subtractElements(frml, "H")
frml
## [1] "C4HONa3"

The counts for individual elements in a chemical formula can be calculated with the countElements function.

countElements(frml)
##  C  H  O Na 
##  4  1  1  3

4 Contributions

If you would like to contribute any low-level functionality, please open a GitHub issue to discuss it. Please note that any contributions should follow the style guide and will require an appropriate unit test.

If you wish to reuse any functions in this package, please just go ahead. If you would like any advice or seek help, please either open a GitHub issue.

Session information

## R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
## Running under: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /home/biocbuild/bbs-3.13-bioc/R/lib/libRblas.so
## LAPACK: /home/biocbuild/bbs-3.13-bioc/R/lib/libRlapack.so
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_GB              LC_COLLATE=C              
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] MetaboCoreUtils_1.0.0 BiocStyle_2.20.0     
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] bookdown_0.22       digest_0.6.27       R6_2.5.0           
##  [4] jsonlite_1.7.2      magrittr_2.0.1      evaluate_0.14      
##  [7] stringi_1.6.2       rlang_0.4.11        jquerylib_0.1.4    
## [10] bslib_0.2.5.1       rmarkdown_2.8       tools_4.1.0        
## [13] stringr_1.4.0       xfun_0.23           yaml_2.2.1         
## [16] compiler_4.1.0      BiocManager_1.30.15 htmltools_0.5.1.1  
## [19] knitr_1.33          sass_0.4.0