The Development of Metabolic Phenotyping—A Historical Perspective

In this chapter, a broad history of the field of metabolic phenotyping (also known as metabonomics and metabolomics) is presented. Largely overlooked pioneering studies from the 1960s and 1970s are described, and this is then followed by a description of the main development of the field using modern analytical chemistry techniques, mainly nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. The use of multivariate statistics and related methods that are used to interpret the complex data led to the dramatic progress made in the field. The expansion into animal models of disease and drug toxicity is described, and the current explosive increase in large-scale epidemiologic studies at one end of the range and high precision clinical studies for stratified medicine at the other is discussed. This has led to the concept of dedicated phenome centers for metabolic phenotyping and the current state of the art is explained.