Systematic NMR Analysis of Stable Isotope Labeled Metabolite Mixtures in Plant and Animal Systems: Coarse Grained Views of Metabolic Pathways

Metabolic phenotyping has become an important ‘bird's-eye-view’ technology which can be applied to higher organisms, such as model plant and animal systems in the post-genomics and proteomics era. Although genotyping technology has expanded greatly over the past decade, metabolic phenotyping has languished due to the difficulty of ‘top-down’ chemical analyses. Here, we describe a systematic NMR methodology for stable isotope-labeling and analysis of metabolite mixtures in plant and animal systems.C labeling has allowed reliable signal assignment using analytical separation techniques such as 3D HCCH-COSY spectra in higher organism extracts.C-HSQC signals, we have determined the changes in metabolic networks that are associated with energy and nitrogen metabolism