“If you want to understand the state of a living thing, the best thing to do is to look at the instantaneous concentration of all the chemicals [it produces],” says Jeffrey Hoch, a structural biologist and biophysicist at the University of Connecticut. The most widely used technique for painting this chemical picture, called the metabolome, is mass spectrometry. But metabolomics researchers such as Hoch say biologists should also get hip to the advantages of a somewhat underused technique, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.
The strength of the NMR signal is proportional to the amount of a metabolite in the sample—be it serum, tissue in vitro, or a live mouse. NMR has lower sensitivity than mass spec, but that’s not a problem when looking at abundant metabolites—and NMR has unique advantages. The method doesn’t destroy samples, and sample prep is relatively straightforward.
Researchers can use metabolic signatures traced by NMR to ...
