Fast and Quantitative NMR Metabolite Analysis Afforded by a Paramagnetic Co‐Solute

NMR spectroscopy is an indispensable technique for the determination of the chemical identity and structure of small molecules. The method is especially recognized for its robustness and intrinsically quantitative nature, and has manifested itself as a key analytical platform for diverse fields of application, ranging from chemical synthesis to metabolomics. Unfortunately, the slow recovery of nuclear spin polarization by spin‐lattice (T₁) relaxation causes most experimental time to be lost on idle waiting. Furthermore, truly quantitative NMR (qNMR) spectroscopy requires waiting times of 5‐times the longest T₁ in the sample, making qNMR spectroscopy slow and inefficient. We demonstrate here that co‐solute paramagnetic relaxation can mitigate these two problems simultaneously. The addition of a small amount of paramagnetic gadolinium chelate, available in the form of commercial contrast‐agent solutions, enables cheap, quantitative, and efficient high‐throughput mixture analysis.     

Positional Enrichment by Proton Analysis (PEPA): A One‐Dimensional 1H‐NMR Approach for 13C Stable Isotope Tracer Studies in Metabolomics

A novel metabolomics approach for NMR‐based stable isotope tracer studies called PEPA is presented, and its performance validated using human cancer cells. PEPA detects the position of carbon label in isotopically enriched metabolites and quantifies fractional enrichment by indirect determination of ¹³C‐satellite peaks using 1D‐¹H‐NMR spectra. In comparison with ¹³C‐NMR, TOCSY and HSQC, PEPA improves sensitivity, accelerates the elucidation of ¹³C positions in labeled metabolites and the quantification of the percentage of stable isotope enrichment. Altogether, PEPA provides a novel framework for extending the high‐throughput of ¹H‐NMR metabolic profiling to stable isotope tracing in metabolomics, facilitating and complementing the information derived from 2D‐NMR experiments and expanding the range of isotopically enriched metabolites detected in cellular extracts.