Usage of NMR Spectroscopy in Profiling Metabonomics

Project Report from the year 2016 in the subject Chemistry - Organic Chemistry, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: Maintaining a specific quality of the food and drinks today is a challenge for any manufacturer, because of todays modern methods by which impurities and fraud such as incorrect labeling of the product type or the type and origin of the ingredients. NMR spectroscopy is a reliable method to detect any deviation of the content to the informations on the Labelling. In the beginning NMR spectroscopy was only used to solve the organic and inorganic structural problems. For example, reaction products can be determined, reaction mechanisms are elucidated or structural isomers are identified. In recent decades, however, through a lot of methodological and instrumental developments many new useful applications were added. Today the NMR spectroscopy finds an important application in the Metabolomic studies for example in biological fluids such as urine, plasma and blood. Together with standardized NMR spectra databases as reference for the identification of the metabolites that are contained in the sample. Benefits are the ease of use and low cost, for example a 1D spectrum is measured in a few minutes, this can be very well reproduced with minimal effort for sample preparation (typically only the addition of buffer).