Sweat: A sample with limited present applications and promising future in metabolomics

Sweat is a biofluid with present scant use as clinical sample. This review tries to demonstrate the advantages of sweat over other biofluids such as blood or urine for routine clinical analyses and the potential when related to metabolomics. With this aim, critical discussion of sweat samplers and equipment for analysis of target compounds in this sample is made. Well established routine analyses in sweat as is that to diagnose cystic fibrosis, and the advantages and disadvantages of sweat versus urine or blood for doping control have also been discussed. Methods for analytes such as essential metals and xenometals, ethanol and electrolytes in sweat in fact constitute target metabolomics approaches or belong to any metabolomics subdiscipline such as metallomics, ionomics or xenometabolomics. The higher development of biomarkers based on genomics or proteomics as omics older than metabolomics is discussed and also the potential role of metabolomics in systems biology taking into account its emergent implementation. Normalization of the volume of sampled sweat constitutes a present unsolved shortcoming that deserves investigation. Foreseeable trends in this area are outlined. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.