Metabonomics/metabolomics is an important science for the understanding of biological systems and the prediction
of their behaviour, through the profiling of metabolites. Two technologies are routinely used in order to analyse
metabolite profiles in biological fluids: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass
spectrometry (MS), the latter typicallywith hyphenation to a chromatography system such as liquid chromatography
(LC), in a configuration known as LC–MS.With both NMR and MS-based detection technologies, the identification
of the metabolites in the biological sample remains a significant obstacle and bottleneck. This article
provides guidance on methods for metabolite identification in biological fluids using NMR spectroscopy, and is
illustrated with examples from recent studies on mice.