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Recommendations and Best Practices for Standardizing the Pre-Analytical Processing of Blood and Urine Samples in Metabolomics

2020; Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute; Volume: 10; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3390/metabo10060229

2218-1989

Raúl González‐Domínguez, Álvaro González‐Domínguez, Ana Sayago, Ángeles Fernández-Recamales,

Traditional Chinese Medicine Studies

Metabolomics can be significantly influenced by a range of pre-analytical factors, such as sample collection, pre-processing, aliquoting, transport, storage and thawing. This therefore shows the crucial need for standardizing the pre-analytical phase with the aim of minimizing the inter-sample variability driven by these technical issues, as well as for maintaining the metabolic integrity of biological samples to ensure that metabolomic profiles are a direct expression of the in vivo biochemical status. This review article provides an updated literature revision of the most important factors related to sample handling and pre-processing that may affect metabolomics results, particularly focusing on the most commonly investigated biofluids in metabolomics, namely blood plasma/serum and urine. Finally, we also provide some general recommendations and best practices aimed to standardize and accurately report all these pre-analytical aspects in metabolomics research.