Targeted Metabolomics Finds Its Mark in Diabetes Research

Numerous biochemical pathways are deranged indiabetes, especially those involving metabolicfuels. Metabolomics, which seeks to simulta-neously measure many small molecules, shows promise as a source of mechanistic insight into the mo-lecular pathology of diabetes (1), but no systematic ap-proach has yet come into wide use. Methods vary greatly from laboratory to laboratory. For most of the last decade, metabolomic studies in diabetes have been dominated by nontargeted methods in which nuclear magnetic reso-nance spectroscopy (NMR) or mass spectrometry (MS) are used to gather large and complex datasets from which investigators extract information on metabolites that characterize a biological condition of interest (2–8). Our own approach has centered on targeted MS methods, in which labeled internal standards are used in conjunction with narrowly focused instrumental methods to yield quantitative data on panels of chemically similar metabo-