Hi everyone, I am very new to single-cell metabolomics and today I want to jump in this area. I have been reading many review papers related to identification of metabolites at single-cell resolution from spectral data through spectral library search and I have a question that cannot find out a solution.
The common workflow to identify mebolites I have discovered so far is that starting from, let say, 1000 live cells, we extract the content of each cell, put them to, let say, GC-TOF-MS technology to have spectral graphs (x-axis presents m/z values and y-axis presents intensities), and finally compare the spectral graph of each cell against a certain spectral library to infer metabolites.
The thing is we know that a single cell has multiple metabolites regulating cellular functions of that cell. However, the data I see show that each cell has only one spectrum (the figure below) => we can only find out 1 metabolite for one cell??? Is that true? Or something I am missing?
Thanks in advance
