SOFAST-HMQC—an efficient tool for metabolomics

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolomics relies mostly on 1D NMR; however, the technique is limited by overlap of the signals from the metabolites. In order to circumvent this problem, 2D 1H-13C correlation spectroscopy techniques are often used. However owing to poorer natural abundance and gyromagnetic ratio of 13C, the acquisition time for 2D 1H-13C heteronuclear single quantum coherence spectroscopy (HSQC) is long. This makes it almost impossible to be used in high throughput study. We have reported the application of selective optimized flip angle short transient (SOFAST) technique coupled to heteronuclear multiple quantum correlation (HMQC) along with nonlinear sampling (NUS) in urine and serum samples. This technique takes sevenfold less experimental time than the conventional 1H-13C HSQC experiment with retention of almost all molecular information. Hence, this can be used for high throughput study.