Metabolomics: A Powerful Tool to Understand the Schizophrenia Biology

Schizophrenia, as any other psychiatric disorder, is a multifactorial and complex illness whose etiology is not completely established. Therefore, studies involving strategies that are able to describe the molecular alterations caused by the disease and, consequently, indicate the altered metabolic pathways are of increasing interest. Metabolomics is a very suitable approach that can be applied for this task, since it consists of the evaluation of the set of metabolites contained in a biological system undergoing a biological process, such as a disease or treatment. In metabolomics, state-of-the-art analytical techniques (mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance) are employed to identify and quantify the metabolites present in the studied biological samples, and chemometric and bioinformatic tools are applied to determine the specific metabolites and metabolic pathways that are relevant to the biological process under investigation. The aim of this chapter is to describe the basic principles of metabolomics, how this strategy can improve the understanding of the schizophrenia biology, and the findings obtained so far.