The growing landscape of metabolomics and lipidomics: applications to medicinal chemistry and drug discovery

MS-based metabolomics is the foremost systematic strategy for identifying and quantifying metabolites, which are involved in biological processes and metabolic pathways. This approach has also become the foundation of biomarker discovery, a crucial breakthrough in modern clinical chemistry [5]. For example, by performing MS-based metabolomics coupled with transcriptomics experiments on identical sets of plasma samples from patients with cervical cancer, Yang et al. identified six metabolites that are potential biomarkers for early detection of cervical cancer [6]. Using patients’ plasma as primary samples, this study also demonstrates the noninvasive nature of MS-based metabolomics studies, which confers great advantage for MS-based...