Mass spectrometry for breath analysis

Breath analysis is an attractive strategy for chemically monitoring the metabolic dynamics of living organisms including human beings and other mammals in a non-invasive way. This analysis involves detecting metabolites contained in the exhaled breath aerosol samples, and offers rich valuable information to evaluate the health status and therapy effectiveness. Mass spectrometry is a powerful analytical platform for breath analysis. Soon after their development, hyphenated mass spectrometry techniques have been increasingly used in breath analysis, although their performance is compromised by the tedious sample pretreatment. Ambient mass spectrometry maximizes the throughput of mass analysis of biosamples due to minimal/no sample pretreatment and thus has been widely adopted for breath analysis. As a tutorial review, this paper introduces principle, instrumental setup, analytical procedures and characteristics, typical applications and performance, and future development prospects of the mass spectrometry-based techniques for breath analysis, facilitating the further development and application of breath analysis.