The mission of the Metabolomics Core Laboratory at NTU research center for Medical Excellence is to provide a world-class metabolomics knowledge infrastructure to improve translational research and human health.

Operating as a multidisciplinary service core, the MetaCore will serve as a bridge for basic research and clinics concerning the potential and benefits of metabolomics impacting the personalized medicine.

Metabolomics (or metabonomics) is defined as "the quantitative measurement of the dynamic metabolic response (metabolites) of living systems to patho-physiological stimuli or genetic modification". Metabolomics place is fundamental within the hierarchy of Genome, Transcriptome, Proteome, and Metabolome in consistent with the central dogma of molecular biology (see Figure 1).

Much like genomics aims to unravel the structure of the genome, metabolomics focuses on understanding the many small molecule metabolites that result from a cell/organ/organism’s metabolic processes. There are an estimated 5,000 - 20,000 endogenous human metabolites, and analyzing their production gives an accurate picture of the physiology of a cell/organ/organism at a given moment in time. Whereas the cell’s genotype can predict its physiology to a limited extent, Metabolomics predicts closest the phenotypes.  Therefore, the immediate impact of disease, nutrition, pharmaceutical treatment, and genetic modifications can be easily revealed. The ultimate power of analyzing Metabolome is its nature of direct molecular structure elucidation that is easy to be interpreted. Therefore the differences of altered, stressed or abnormal physiological states would be characterized and direct biomarkers for such states could be identified. The identified biomarkers would lead to more advanced mechanistic hypotheses for disease diagnosis and prognosis.