Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 15, 2026

Metabolomic Analysis of Rat Brain by High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of Tissue Extracts
Published on: September 21, 2014
Quantification of phosphocholine and glycerophosphocholine with 31P edited 1H NMR spectroscopy
Nikolaus M Loening1, Anne M Chamberlin, Andrea G Zepeda
1Department of Chemistry, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR 97219, USA. loening@lclark.edu
Abstract:
Choline and the related compounds phosphocholine (PC) and glycerophosphocholine (GPC) are considered to be important metabolites in oncology. Past studies have demonstrated correlations linking the relative ratios and concentrations of these metabolites with the development and progression of cancer. Currently, in vivo and tissue ex vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy methods have mostly centered on measuring the total concentration of these metabolites and have difficulty in differentiating between them. Here, a new scheme that uses (31)P edited (1)H spectroscopy to quantify the concentrations of choline, PC and GPC in biological samples is reported and its applicability is demonstrated using samples of human brain tumor extracts. This method is particularly well-suited for analytical situations where the PC and GPC resonances are not sufficiently resolved and/or are obscured by other metabolites. Consequently, this scheme has the potential to be used for the analysis of choline compounds in ex vivo tissue samples.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Synthesis of Phosphatidylcholine in the ER Membrane
The major components of all eukaryotic cell...
¹³C NMR: Distortionless Enhancement by Polarization Transfer (DEPT)
2D NMR: Heteronuclear Single-Quantum Correlation Spectroscopy (HSQC)
¹H NMR Signal Integration: Overview
¹H NMR: Pople Notation
A proton...
Other Nuclides: 31P, 19F, 15N NMR
While fluorine-19 and phosphorous-31 have high natural abundances (100%) and positive gyromagnetic ratios, nitrogen-15 has a low natural abundance and a negative gyromagnetic ratio. However, nitrogen-15 is still preferred over nitrogen-14 (which has a high...

