Present and future of pure shift NMR in metabolomics

NMR is one of the most powerful techniques for the analysis of biological samples in the field of metabolomics. However, the high complexity of fluids, tissues, or other biological materials taken from living organisms is still a challenge for state‐of‐the‐art pulse sequences, thereby limiting the detection, the identification, and the quantification of metabolites. In this context, the resolution enhancement provided by broadband homonuclear decoupling methods, which allows for simplifying 1H multiplet patterns into singlets, has placed this so‐called pure shift technique as a promising approach to perform metabolic profiling with unparalleled level of detail. In recent years, the many advances achieved in the design of pure shift experiments has paved the way to the analysis of a wide range of biological samples with ultra‐high resolution. This review leads the reader from the early days of the main pure shift methods that have been successfully developed over the last decades to address complex samples, to the most recent and promising applications of pure shift NMR to the field of NMR‐based metabolomics. Advances in pure shift NMR have paved the way to the ultrahigh resolution analysis of a broad range of biological samples. Here, we review the applications of the main broadband homonuclear decoupling methods that have been successfully used to perform highly detailed metabolic profiling. We describe how the performance of pure shift NMR has contributed to improve the main steps of metabolomics workflows and which progress can be expected for the development of this technique in the future.