Summary recommendations for standardization and reporting of metabolic analyses.

The article focuses on summary recommendations for standardization and reporting of metabolic analyses. The Standard Metabolic Reporting Structures (SMRS) group is a collection of interested parties from academia, industry and the government that first came together in November 2003 to derive and recommend standards for conducting and reporting metabonomics and metabolomics studies. These multivariate metabolic analyses have diverse applications, including pre-clinical drug safety assessment, disease diagnosis, plant metabolite profiling and environmental science. For a particular algorithm used to derive a model, any specific parameters relevant to the algorithm and the particular implementation of algorithm used should be stated. Because biological research now relies on so many different technologies, various protocols, terms, definitions, methods and reporting structures have developed within sub-disciplines employing the various techniques.