Robust algorithms for automated chemical shift calibration of 1D 1H NMR spectra of blood serum.

In biofluid NMR spectroscopy, the frequency of each resonance is typically calibrated by addition of a reference compound such as 3-(trimethylsilyl)-propionic acid- d 4 (TSP) to the sample. However biofluids such as serum cannot be referenced to TSP, due to shifts resonance caused by binding to macromolecules in solution. In order to overcome this limitation we have developed algorithms, based on analysis of derivative spectra, to locate and calibrate (1)H NMR spectra to the alpha-glucose anomeric doublet. We successfully used these algorithms to calibrate 77 serum (1)H NMR spectra and demonstrate the greater reproducibility of the calculated chemical-shift corrections ( r = 0.97) than those generated by manual alignment ( r = 0.8-0.88). Hence we show that these algorithms provide robust and reproducible methods of calibrating (1)H NMR of serum, plasma, or any biofluid in which glucose is abundant. Precise automated calibration of complex biofluid NMR spectra is an important tool in large-scale metabonomic or metabolomic studies, where hundreds or even thousands of spectra may be analyzed in high-resolution by pattern recognition analysis.