Practical Guide to NMR-based Metabolomics - I : Introduction and Experiments

Metabolomics is one of latest '-omics', which is to analyze metabolome in cells, tissues and biofluids and to study metabolisms. It has become increasingly popular since 1990. The first goal of metabolomics is to analyze metabolites in a technical aspect. The major two analytical platforms in metabolomics are NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (MS). MS is superior to NMR for detecting many more metabolites. That is one of the most important factors in metabolomics. However, NMR also has several advantages over MS. In this review, I firstly introduced metabolomics by comparing NMR-based metabolomics and MS-based metabolomics. Second, I explored technical issues on sample preparation and NMR experiments for metabolite identification and quantification.