NMR-based metabolomics: a holistic approach for monitoring complex biological systems

Abstract

Metabolomics is a novel approach with a huge potential to assess and reveal in a complex biological system altered metabolism produced in response to environmental stressors, diseases or exposure to toxicants. The high applicability of this approach is due to its ability to qualitatively and quantitatively characterize the chemical profile of all the low molecular weight metabolites (metabolome) present in cells, tissues, organs, and biological fluids as end products of the cellular regulatory pathways. Thus, providing a snapshot of the phenotype of a biological system, metabolomics offers useful contributions to a comprehensive insight into the functional status of human, animal, plant, and microbe organisms. One of the main analytical platforms employed in metabolomics is the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy that, when linked with pattern recognition techniques and data mining tools, can provide an overview of the metabolic status of a complex biological system and comprehensive insights into important metabolic processes. Over the last decade, the number of scientific publications in the metabolomics area has increased exponentially. The literature analysis revealed metabolomics applications in a wide range of fields including medical, animal, plant, environmental and food sciences.

Keywords

• biological systems
• metabolomics
• 1h nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy
• chemometrics
• research field