The plasma metabolome and lipidome are largely robust to common storage conditions in patient samples. However, refrigerated plasma storage time post-centrifugation and an additional freeze-thaw cycle can induce biologically significant changes in specific metabolites and lipids. This study is among the first to evaluate metabolomic and lipidomic stability using clinical samples and our data supports a sample collection that can be easily implemented in clinical laboratory workflows.
Guttorm et al. (2026) studied this question.