Metabolomics is the study which detects the changes of metabolites level. Metabolomics is a terminal view of the biological system. The end products of the metabolism, metabolites, reflect the responses to external environment. Therefore metabolomics gives the additional information about understanding the metabolic pathways. These metabolites can be used as biomarkers that indicate the disease or external stresses such as exposure to toxicant. Many kinds of biological samples are used in metabolomics, for example, cell, tissue, and bio fluids. NMR spectroscopy is one of the tools of metabolomics. NMR data are analyzed by multivariate statistical analysis and target profiling technique. Recently, NMR-based metabolomics is a growing field in various studies such as disease diagnosis, forensic science, and toxicity assessment.

Metabolomics is a field that studies systematic dynamics and secretion of metabolites from cells to understand biological pathways based on metabolite changes. The metabolic profiling of intact human colorectal tissues was performed using high-resolution magic angle spinning (HR-MAS) NMR spectroscopy, which was unnecessary to extract metabolites from tissues. We used two different groups of samples, which were defined as normal and cancer, from 9 patients with colorectal cancer and investigated the samples in NMR experiments with a water suppression pulse sequence. We applied target profiling and multivariative statistical analysis to the analyzed 1D NMR spectra to identify the metabolites and discriminate between normal and cancer tissues. Cancer tissue showed higher levels of arginine, betaine, glutamate, lysine, taurine and lower levels of glutamine, hypoxanthine, isoleucine, lactate, methionine, pyruvate, tyrosine relative to normal tissue. In the OPLS-DA (orthogonal partial least square discriminant analysis), the score plot showed good separation between the normal and cancer groups. These results suggest that metabolic profiling of colorectal cancer could provide new biomarkers.