Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC[Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text]GC-MS) has been used to analyze multiple samples in a metabolomics study. However, due to some uncontrollable experimental conditions, such as the differences in temperature or pressure, matrix effects on samples and stationary phase degradation, there is always a shift of retention times in the two GC columns between samples. In order to correct the retention time shifts in GC[Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text]GC-MS, the peak alignment is a crucial data analysis step to recognize the peaks generated by the same metabolite in different samples. Two approaches have been developed for GC[Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text]GC-MS data alignment: profile alignment and peak matching alignment. However, these existing alignment methods are all based on a local alignment, resulting that a peak may not be correctly aligned in a dense chromatographic region where many peaks are present in a small region. False alignment will result in false discovery in the downstream statistical analysis. We, therefore, develop a global comparison-based peak alignment method using point matching algorithm (PMA-PA) for both homogeneous and heterogeneous data. The developed algorithm PMA-PA first extracts feature points (peaks) in the chromatography and then searches globally the matching peaks in the consecutive chromatography by adopting the projection of rigid and nonrigid transformation. PMA-PA is further applied to two real experimental data sets, showing that PMA-PA is a promising peak alignment algorithm for both homogenous and heterogeneous data in terms of [Formula: see text]1 score, although it uses only peak location information.
Keywords: GC-MS; metabolomics; peak alignment; point matching algorithm.