ABSTRACT
The concept, characteristics and history of metabonomics are introduced. The techniques used in data acquisition and data analysis in metabonomics including their advantages and disadvantages are summarized. In data acquisition platform, NMR, GC/MS, LC/MS (/MS) are the prevalent techniques although at present, none of them is a perfect technique that could meet with the requirement of the metabonomics for measuring all metabolites. While in data analysis, the PCA, PLS and ANN are the major techniques. The researchers could select them according to the research destination. Recent advances and applications of metabonomics in disease diagnosis, drug toxicity evaluation, plant metabolomics and microbial metabolomics are reviewed. In addition, by giving the situation on the establishment of the related corporations, the conferences about metabonomics and proclamation of NIH roadmap the current boom of the metabonomics is reflected. It can be expected that with the development of the function genomics, metabonomics will play a major role in the discovery of the phynotype of the genome and searching for the disease diagnostic biomarkers, and it will also bring much benefit to the drug discovery, clinical diagnosis and nutrition science.