The NIH Common Fund has identified Metabolomics as one of the cross-cutting research areas that can potentially have wide ranging impact on our understanding of disease mechanisms and identifying novel therapeutic targets. In order to increase metabolomics research capacity in the United States, the NIH Common Fund has developed a multi-component Program to help overcome current challenges. This requirement is aimed at addressing one of the challenges, namely the lack of high quality and authentic standards for identification, characterization and quantitation of metabolites visualized through currently available analytical techniques. The goal is to increase the repertoire of chemically identifiable metabolites to achieve greater coverage of the metabolome.