The combination of four analytical methods to explore skeletal muscle metabolomics: Better coverage of metabolic pathways or a marketing argument?

This study reports the validation of several analytical methods, based on nuclear magnetic resonance and several mass spectrometry methods, to explore the muscle metabolome from a small amount of tissue, comparable to that obtained during a clinical trial. The combination of several techniques may be relevant for the exploration of muscle metabolism, with acceptable analytical variability and overlap between methods However, the difficult and time-consuming data pre-processing, processing, and statistical analysis steps do not justify systematically combining analytical methods.