ABSTRACT
If the ultimate aim of metabonomics is to detect every small molecule metabolite and xenobiotic in a biofluid, tissue, or organism then it would be supposed that the most sensitive analytical techniques should be used. One of the most sensitive atom-specific analytical approaches remains mass spectrometry (MS) but this is destructive. However, one advantage that is intrinsic to NMR spectroscopy is that the
technique is nondestructive and in many cases noninvasive. Indeed, this has led to many medical applications of the NMR effect to detect molecules in vivo, particularly in terms of imaging (magnetic resonance imaging, MRI). However, the initial successes of in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) have since been impeded by the relatively small number of metabolites that can be observed routinely. While MRS has found extensive applications in following cerebral disorders, the biochemical changes recorded have been confined to a small number of metabolites that are readily observable using this technique as depicted in Fig. 1. For example, in cerebral tissue the major observable metabolites are choline, N-acetyl aspartate (NAA), creatine, and lactate. However, the exact role of NAA, often the largest resonance detected in vivo and the level of which has since been correlated with the progression of diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Huntingdon’s disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and stroke (1-3), is still strongly debated.
