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NPC publishes NMR methods for profiling of human biofluids

The NPC has published a paper detailing its analytical and preparative procedures for metabolic phenotyping of human urine, blood-serum and blood-plasma by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy.

In a first stage of development of protocols and workflows capable of delivery large-scale metabolic phenotyping, the National Phenome Centre’s NMR team have published their work detailing how they have created methods to make them robust and reproducible to develop standardised protocols. Proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolic phenotyping of urine and blood plasma/serum samples provides important prognostic and diagnostic information and permits monitoring of disease progression in an objective manner. Much effort has been made in recent years to develop NMR instrumentation and technology to allow the acquisition of data in an effective, reproducible, and high-throughput approach that allows the study of general population samples from epidemiological collections for biomarkers of disease risk. The challenge remains to develop highly reproducible methods and standardized protocols that minimize technical or experimental bias, allowing realistic interlaboratory comparisons of subtle biomarker information. In this paper, the National Phenome Centre were able to present a detailed set of

updated protocols that carefully consider major experimental conditions, including sample preparation, spectrometer parameters, NMR pulse sequences, throughput, reproducibility, quality control, and resolution. These results provide an experimental platform that facilitates NMR spectroscopy usage across different large cohorts of biofluid samples, enabling integration of global metabolic profiling that is a prerequisite for personalized healthcare.

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