Standard operating procedure for metabonomics studies of blood serum and plasma samples using a 1H-NMR micro-flow probe.

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is presented for high-throughput metabonomics studies using a 600 MHz NMR spectrometer equipped with a micro-flow probe that is connected to an auto-sampler. The procedure is designed to minimize random and systematic variation of NMR data collection. In addition, a protocol is described to assess the quality of the data acquired by a given NMR spectroscopist to ensure that (i) all researchers involved in the NMR data acquisition of a metabonomics research program perform equally and (ii) operator-associated variation of NMR data collection is statistically not relevant for the interpretation of results obtained from multivariate data analyses.