A field of life science research that uses High Throughput (HT) technologies to identify and/or characterize all the small molecules or metabolites in a given cell, tissue or organism (i.e., the metabolome) is called metabolomics. The first NMR based metabolic studies were carried out by Wilson and Burlingame in the year 1974. NMR is one of the most selective analytical techniques which offer structural information of molecules.

The NMR workflow is as follows:

Sample preparationàSample loading and spectral acquisitionàSpectral processingàSpectral deconvolutionàData interpretation.

Future work is expected to build upon core strengths of NMR Spectroscopy, which includes its versatility and specificity in the form of 1D and higher dimensional spectra, its reproducibility, its quantitative ability, its capability for following chemical reactions and flux, its ability to identify compounds and deduce structures of unknowns, and its growing potential for collecting metabolomics data in vivo.