Metabolism by In Vivo NMR
Chapter One
Introduction
Robert G. Shulman
Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Diagnostic Radiology, PO Box 208043,
New Haven, CT 06520-8024, USA
The wonderful advances of biochemistry, molecular biology and structural biology in the last half-century
have created a foundation which in vivo NMR has utilized in the attack upon more complex organismic
levels. Metabolic pathways, whose fluxes and intermediates are controlled by enzymes and genes in
response to an organism's needs, are considered by some to be a worn-out topic of investigation - one
that is largely 'complete'. The basic concepts are well established, the argument goes, and only minor
details remain to be worked out. We feel that this view misses the most important point of reductionist
biology - namely, that which has been established at one level can illuminate the more complex. For
the past three decades scientists using in vivo nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to study
metabolism have been developing an interdisciplinary vision for the future of biology at the molecular
level. While their experimental findings and the immediate applications to particular metabolic pathways
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