Standard Reference Material (SRM®) 1950 metabolites in frozen human plasma—use, impact, lessons learned, and future perspectives

In 2011, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued Standard Reference Material (SRM)® 1950 Metabolites in Frozen Human Plasma to support metabolomics measurements. This critical review traces the development of SRM 1950 and assesses its use and impact over the past 15 years. To evaluate its impact, we reviewed more than 400 technical papers demonstrating its broad adoption in analytical, metabolomic, and lipidomic research. While SRM 1950 included certified values for selected amino acids, fatty acids, and clinical markers (such as cholesterol, glucose, 25-hydroxyvitamin D, and steroid hormones), its greatest impact has been as a shared material for interlaboratory comparisons and the community-generated consensus or target values established for the broad scope of compounds commonly measured in metabolomic and lipidomic studies. Many studies used SRM 1950 to validate analytical methods against NIST-certified values, while over 50 papers provided extensive qualitative and quantitative characterization and compared their results with interlaboratory consensus values and other studies to assess method and platform performance. The success of SRM 1950 helped to catalyze the development of additional NIST reference materials (RMs) for the "omics" communities and highlighted the potential of existing clinical and environmental matrix SRMs for further untargeted characterization and community reporting. Based on this literature review, we offer recommendations to expand the use and impact of the next generation of SRM 1950 and other SRMs/RMs intended and/or useful for untargeted analyses.