title: Evidence of different metabolic phenotypes in humans.
abstract: The study of metabolic responses to drugs, environmental changes, and diseases is a new promising area of metabonomic research. Metabolic fingerprints can be obtained by analytical techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). In principle, alterations of these fingerprints due to appearance/disappearance or concentration changes of metabolites can provide early evidences of, for example, onset of diseases. A major drawback in this approach is the strong day-to-day variability of the individual metabolic fingerprint, which should be rather called a metabolic "snapshot." We show here that a thorough statistical analysis performed on NMR spectra of human urine samples reveals an invariant part characteristic of each person, which can be extracted from the analysis of multiple samples of each single subject. This finding (i) provides evidence that individual metabolic phenotypes may exist and (ii) opens new perspectives to metabonomic studies, based on the possibility of eliminating the daily "noise" by multiple sample collection.
authors.affiliation: ProtEra, Viale delle Idee 22, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Assfalg
authors.forename: Ivano
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Bertini
authors.forename: Donato
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Colangiuli
authors.forename: Claudio
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Luchinat
authors.forename: Hartmut
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Schäfer
authors.forename: Birk
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schütz
authors.forename: Manfred
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Spraul
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009682:Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy; D008297:Male; D008660:Metabolism; D008875:Middle Aged; D010641:Phenotype; D014556:Urine / Q000737:chemistry*