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Updated: Mar 22, 2026

Identification and Quantification of Deranged Metabolites in Critically Ill Patients Using NMR-Based Metabolomics
Published on: November 29, 2024
A guide to the identification of metabolites in NMR-based metabonomics/metabolomics experiments
Anthony C Dona1, Michael Kyriakides1, Flora Scott2
1Department of Surgery and Cancer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
Metabonomics/metabolomics is an important science for the understanding of biological systems and the prediction of their behaviour, through the profiling of metabolites. Two technologies are routinely used in order to analyse metabolite profiles in biological fluids: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (MS), the latter typically with hyphenation to a chromatography system such as liquid chromatography (LC), in a configuration known as LC-MS. With both NMR and MS-based detection technologies, the identification of the metabolites in the biological sample remains a significant obstacle and bottleneck. This article provides guidance on methods for metabolite identification in biological fluids using NMR spectroscopy, and is illustrated with examples from recent studies on mice.
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