You are here:
International NMR-based Environmental Metabolomics Intercomparison Exercise
Citation:
Viant, M. R., D. Bearden, J. G. Bundy, I. Burton, T. W. COLLETTE, D. R. EKMAN, V. Ezernieks, T. Karakach, C. Y. Lin, S. Rochfort, J. S. De Ropp, Q. TENG, R. S. Tjeerdema, J. Walter, AND H. Wu. International NMR-based Environmental Metabolomics Intercomparison Exercise. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 43(1):219-225, (2009).
Impact/Purpose:
The mission of the ERD Metabolomics Team is to study the impact of stressors on various species using NMR and other advanced analytical approaches to characterize changes in endogenous metabolites. The main focus is to define responses in ecologically-relevant organisms (e.g., small fish) upon exposure to potentially toxic xenobiotic chemicals.
Description:
Several fundamental requirements must be met so that NMR-based metabolomics and the related technique of metabonomics can be formally adopted into environmental monitoring and chemical risk assessment. Here we report an intercomparison exercise which has evaluated the effectiveness of 1H NMR metabolomics to generate comparable datasets from environmentally derived samples. It focuses on laboratory practice that follows sample collection and metabolite extraction, specifically the final stages of sample preparation, NMR data collection (500, 600 and 800 MHz), data processing and multivariate analysis. Seven laboratories have participated from the USA, Canada, UK and Australia, generating a total of ten datasets. Phase 1 comprised the analysis of synthetic metabolite mixtures, while Phase 2 investigated European flounder (Platichthys flesus) liver extracts from clean and contaminated sites. Overall, the comparability of datasets from the participating laboratories was good. Principal components analyses (PCA) of the individual datasets yielded ten highly similar scores plots for the synthetic mixtures, with a comparable result for the liver extracts. Furthermore, the same metabolic biomarkers that discriminated fish from clean and contaminated sites were discovered by all the laboratories. PCA of the combined datasets showed excellent clustering of the multiple analyses. These results demonstrate that NMR-based metabolomics can generate data that are sufficiently comparable between laboratories to support its continued evaluation for regulatory environmental studies.
URLs/Downloads:
EKMAN 08 134.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 292 KB, about PDF)International NMR-based Environmental Metabolomics Intercomparison Exercise
