What is single sample profiling (SSP)?

Metabolite concentrations in biofluids are tightly regulated through homeostasis under normal physiological condition. For common human biofluids such as blood, urine, or cerebral spinal fluids (CSF), normal concentration ranges are known for many metabolites in clinical settings. Many diagnosis are based on the concentrations of small compounds (i.e. glucose concentration for diabetes)

For targeted metabolomics (i.e. absolute concentrations), it is often desirable to know whether these compound concentrations from a particular sample are significantly higher or lower compared to their reported normal ranges. For this purpose, we implemented SSP to compare the measured concentrations of compounds to their recorded normal reference ranges.

Compounds that are above or below the normal range beyond a user-specified threshold will then be further investigated using ORA. Please note, SSP is only applicable to human blood, urine and CSF samples, with normal metabolite concentration ranges based on HMDB biofluids.