The Handbook of Metabonomics and Metabolomics

John Lindon is a Professor and Senior Research Investigator in the Section of Biomolecular Medicine, part of the Department of Surgery and Cancer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, UK. He is also a founder Director of, and a Consultant to, Metabometrix Ltd, a company spun out of Imperial College to exploit the commercial possibilities of metabonomics. He obtained his B.Sc, Ph.D. and D.Sc degrees from Birmingham University UK, was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, New York, USA (1969-1970), then joined the Chemistry Department of Southampton University UK, to use NMR methods to research the properties of liquid crystals and to be responsible for the NMR laboratory. From 1976 to 1995 he was at the Wellcome Research Laboratories (a pharmaceutical company) in the UK, latterly as Head of Spectroscopy, which is now part of GlaxoSmithKline. He then joined Birkbeck College, University of London, and moved to Imperial College London as part of the transfer of the metabonomics team in 1998. He has co-authored a book on NMR of oriented molecules, another on metabonomics in toxicology and, in 2007, one on metabonomics in general. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Spectroscopy and Spectrometry, serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals and has authored many review articles and chapters, plus around 400 research papers. His achievements include the pioneering of a range of NMR data acquisition and processing methods, the use of nematic liquid crystals and NMR spectroscopy for determing accurate molecular structures in the liquid state, and the application of spectroscopy and other physical chemistry methods in drug design. Developments of NMR-based approaches in biomedical research include the use of directly-coupled HPLC-NMR, application of high resolution magic-angle-spinning NMR to tissue samples, and the use of NMR and other analytical methods coupled with multivariate statistics to study biofluids and tissues, a field now termed metabonomics.

Molecular biology operates at three levels - genes, proteins and metabolites. This book is unique in that it provides a comprehensive description of an approach (metabonomics) to characterise the endogenous metabolites in a living system, complementing gene and protein studies (genomics and proteomics). These "omics" methods form the basis for understanding biology at a systems level. The Handbook of Metabonomics and Metabolomics aims to be the definitive work on the rapidly expanding subjects of metabolic profiling, metabolite and biomarker identification, encompassing the fields of metabonomics and metabolomics. It covers the principles of the subject, the analytical and statistical techniques used and the wide variety of applications.

Chapter 1. Metabonomics and metabolomics techniques and their applications in mammalian systems. Chapter 2. Cellular metabolomics: the quest for pathway structure.Chapter 3. NMR spectroscopy techniques for application to metabonomics.Chapter 4. High-resolution magic angle spinning NMR spectroscopy.Chapter 5. Chromatographic and electrophoretic separations combined with mass spectrometry for metabonomics.Chapter 6. Chemometrics techniques for metabonomics.Chapter 7. Nonlinear chemometric methods for the analysis of metabolic profiles.Chapter 8. Databases and standardisation of reporting methods for metabolic studies.Chapter 9. Metabonomics in preclinical pharmaceutical discovery and development.Chapter 10. Metabolic applications in clinical pharmaceutical R&D.Chapter 11. Exploiting the potential of metabonomics in large population studies: three venues. Chapter 12. Metabolite profiling and cardiovascular disease.Chapter 13. The role of NMR-based metabolomics in cancer. Chapter 14. NMR spectroscopy of body fluids as a metabolomics approach to inborn errors of metabolism. Chapter 15. A survey of metabonomics approaches for disease characterisation.Chapter 16. Metabolic profiling: applications in plant science. Chapter 17. In vivo NMR applications of metabonomics.Chapter 18. Applications of metabonomics within environmental toxicology.Chapter 19. Global systems biology through integration of "omics" results.