PURPOSE To present an overview and comparison of the main metabolomics techniques (1H NMR, GC-MS, and LC-MS) and their current and potential use in critical care medicine. SOURCE This is a focused review, not a systematic review, using the PubMed database as the predominant source of references to compare metabolomics techniques. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS 1H NMR, GC-MS, and LC-MS are complementary...

NMR metabolomics are primarily conducted with 1D nuclear Overhauser enhancement spectroscopy (NOESY) presat for water suppression and Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) presat as a T2 filter to remove macromolecule signals. Others pulse sequences exist for these two objectives but are not often used in metabolomics studies, because they are less robust or unknown to the NMR metabolomics community...

Metabolomics aims to provide a global snapshot of all small-molecule metabolites in cells and biological fluids, free of observational biases inherent to more focused studies of metabolism. However, the staggeringly high information content of such global analyses introduces a challenge of its own; efficiently forming biologically relevant conclusions from any given metabolomics dataset indeed ...

The discovery, development and optimal utilization of pharmaceuticals can be greatly enhanced by knowledge of their modes of action. However, many drugs currently on the market act by unknown mechanisms. Untargeted metabolomics offers the potential to discover modes of action for drugs that perturb cellular metabolism. Development of high resolution LC-MS methods and improved data analysis soft...

Plant metabolomics has matured and modern plant metabolomics has accelerated gene discoveries and the elucidation of a variety of plant natural product biosynthetic pathways. This review covers the approximate period of 2000 to 2014, and highlights specific examples of the discovery and characterization of novel genes and enzymes associated with the biosynthesis of natural products such as flav...

CE-MS can be considered a useful analytical technique for the global profiling of (highly) polar and charged metabolites in various samples. Over the past few years, significant advancements have been made in CE-MS approaches for metabolomics studies. In this paper, which is a follow-up of a previous review paper covering the years 2012-2014 (Electrophoresis 2015, 36, 212-224), recent CE-MS str...

Metabolomics represents the new ‘omics’ approach of the functional genomics era. It consists in the identification and quantification of all small molecules, namely metabolites, in a given biological system. While metabolomics refers to the analysis of any possible biological system, metabonomics is specifically applied to disease and physiopathological situations. The data collected within the...

Metabolomics promises a holistic phenotypic characterization of biological responses to toxicants. This technology is based on advanced chemical analytical tools with reasonable throughput, including mass-spectroscopy and NMR. Quality assurance, however - from experimental design, sample preparation, metabolite identification, to bioinformatics data-mining - is urgently needed to assure both qu...

Metabolomics is a key approach in modern functional genomics and systems biology. Due to the complexity of metabolomics data, the variety of experimental designs, and the multiplicity of bioinformatics tools, providing experimenters with a simple and efficient resource to conduct comprehensive and rigorous analysis of their data is of utmost importance. In 2014, we launched the Workflow4Metabol...

Precision medicine, taking account of human individuality in genes, environment, and lifestyle for early disease diagnosis and individualized therapy, has shown great promise to transform medical care. Nontargeted metabolomics, with the ability to detect broad classes of biochemicals, can provide a comprehensive functional phenotype integrating clinical phenotypes with genetic and nongenetic fa...