NMR-based Metabonomics Techniques and Applications

Since the decoding of the human genome, there has been much interest in using changes in gene expression to discover the basis of disease and for the identification of new drug targets. However to date, the promise of the approach is yet to be comprehensively realized and there remains a difficulty in relating such changes to real conventional end points used in diagnosis and pharmaceutical development. The simultaneous measurement of many gene expression changes is termed transriptomics, and is usually carried out in an automatic fashion using so-called gene microarrays. The relevance of such gene changes is not always clear, which has led subsequently to efforts focused on the consequent protein level changes (a subject termed proteomics), but again it is not always possible to relate such changes directly to pathological events.