This timeline highlights some of the conceptual and technological advancements that have permitted the field of metabolomics to evolve into what it is today.

• Ancient Greeks recognize the value of examining body fluids (at this time called humors) to predict disease.

• 300 BC

• Galen creates a system of pathology that combined Hippocrates’ humoral theories with the Pythagorean theory that remained unchallenged until the 17th century.

• 131 AD

• Santorio Sanctorius, considered to be the founding father of metabolic studies, publishes his work on ‘insensible perspiration’ in De Statica medicina, and determined that the sum total of visible excrement (urine, feces, sweat) was less than the amount of substance ingested. This work is considered the first effort to obtain physiological data and provide a quantitative basis to pathophysiology via meticulous study and precise instrumentation.

• 1614 AD

• Thomas Willis, an English physician, performs the first qualitative analysis of urine and found that individuals with diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus could be distinguished by the sweetness of this biological fluid. This work, entitled Pharmaceutice rationalis, was published in Oxford.

• 1674 AD

• Matthew Dobson evaluates urine from diabetics and identifies sugar.

• 1776 AD

• J.J. Thomson at the University of Cambridge constructs the first mass spectrometer (then called a parabola spectrograph).

• 1905 AD

• Otto Knut Olof Folin report methods for the analysis of urine for urea, ammonia, creatine, creatinine, and uric acid, the major non-protein nitrogen-containing compounds in urine. All works were published in the American Journal of Physiology.

• 1905 AD

• Felix Bloch at Stanford University and Edward Purcell at Harvard University simultaneously publish the first NMR spectra in the same issue of Physical Review.

• 1946 AD

• Human Metabolite Mass Spectrometry Profiling: Mamer and Horning perform the first mass-based Metabolomics experiments.

• 1971 AD

• Using established chromatographic separation techniques to detect metabolites, Arthur B. Robinson and Linus Pauling perform analyses of urine and blood metabolites. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• 1976 AD

• Hydrophilic-interaction chromatography for the separation of peptides, nucleic acids and other polar compounds.

• 1990 AD

• Clinical Mass Spectrometry

• 1990 AD

• H. Sauter and colleagues classified the herbicide mode of action and resolved between 100-200 peaks with a high degree of reproducibility and determined the structure of around 70 compounds. Their work was published in Synthesis and Chemistry of Agrochemicals II in 1991.

• 1991 AD

• SG Oliver, MK Winson, DB Kell and F Baganz use the term ‘metabolome’ for the first time in published literature. Their work was published in Trends in Biotechnology. The term ‘metabonomics’ is defined by JK Nicholson, JC Lindon and E Holmes in Xenobiotica as ‘the quantitative measurement of the dynamic multiparametric metabolic response of living systems to pathophysiological stimuli or genetic modifications’.

• 1998-9 AD

• An approach to perform "Sniper" metabolomics using chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. XCMS and XCMS2 facilitated this approach by allowing for peak picking, nonlinear retention time alignment, statistical analysis of the feature and searching the Metlin database.

• 2006 AD