Advances of liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry combined with chemometric approaches applied to metabonomics

Within the past few years, metabonomics, as a newpart of system biology, has gained great prominence besides genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. Thus, it is necessary to detect in vivo metabolites thoroughly and exactly, which is traditionally considered as small endogenous compounds at trace levels, from complex biomatrice as the basic methodological considerations. Liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC/MS) combined with chemometric methods acted as a prominent process to accelerate the development of metabonomics, because of their promising ability in qualitative and quantitative analysis of traue amount of metabolites in complicated samples. The strategies of LC/MS combining chemometric methods and the actualities of metabonomic studies, with the prospective development of this research subject, were discussed in this article.