Metabolomics, the global interrogation of the biochemical components in a biological sample, has become an important complement to genomics and proteomics to aid in the understanding of pathophysiology. Major advantages of metabolomics are the size of the metabolome relative to the genome or proteome and the fact that it provides a view of the existing biochemical phenotype. As such, metabolomi...

Environmental metabolomics can be defined as the application of metabolomics to characterise the metabolism of free-living organisms obtained from the natural environment and of organisms reared under laboratory conditions, where those conditions serve to mimic scenarios encountered in the natural environment. This approach has considerable potential for characterising the responses of organism...

This review presents an overview of the dynamically developing field of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. Metabolomics aims at the comprehensive and quantitative analysis of wide arrays of metabolites in biological samples. These numerous analytes have very diverse physico-chemical properties and occur at different abundance levels. Consequently, comprehensive metabolomics investigations ar...

Metabolomics is the study of metabolites present in biological samples such as biofluids, tissue/cellular extracts and culture media. Combining metabolomic data with multivariate data analysis tools allows us to study alterations in metabolic pathways following different perturbations. Examples of perturbations can be disease state, drug or nutritional interventions with successful applications...

Data handling in the field of NMR metabolomics has historically been reliant on either in-house mathematical routines or long chains of expensive commercial software. Thus, while the relatively simple biochemical protocols of metabolomics maintain a low barrier to entry, new practitioners of metabolomics experiments are forced to either purchase expensive software packages or craft their own da...

Informatics standards and controlled vocabularies are essential for allowing information technology to help exchange, manage, interpret and compare large data collections. In a rapidly evolving field, the challenge is to work out how best to describe, but not prescribe, the use of these technologies and methods. A Metabolomics Standards Workshop was held by the US National Institutes of Health ...

Metabolomics research has evolved considerably, particularly during the last decade. Over the course of this evolution, the interest in this 'omic' discipline is now more evident than ever. However, the future of metabolomics will depend on its capability to find biomarkers. For that reason, data mining constitutes a challenging task in metabolomics workflow. This work has been designed in supp...

Relative to other metabolomics analysis techniques, gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC/MS) is one of the earliest applied analysis techniques in metabolomics. The first paper on metabolomics (metabolic profiling) is derived from the application of GC/MS analysis in urine and tissue extracts (Dalgliesh et al. 1966). With the arrival of omics era and the proposing of metabolomics concept, p...

In recent years, metabolomics has attracted great scientific attention. The metabolomics methodology might permit a view into transitional phases between healthy liver and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. Metabolomics can help to analyze the metabolic alterations that play a main role in the progression of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. Lipid, glucose, amino acid, and bile acid metabolism should be...

While metabolomics has tremendous potential for diagnostic biomarker and therapeutic target discovery, its utility may be diminished by the variability that occurs due to environmental exposures including diet and the influences of the human circadian rhythm. For successful translation of metabolomics findings into the clinical setting, it is necessary to exhaustively define the sources of meta...