Low birth weight has been linked to an increased risk to develop obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension in adult life although the mechanisms underlying the association are not well understood. The objective was to determine whether the metabolomic profile of plasma from umbilical cord differs between low and normal birth weight newborns.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was used to generate metabolic fingerprints of umbilical cord plasma samples. Simultaneously, the metabolomic profiles of the mothers were analysed. The resulting data were subjected to chemometric, principal component and partial least squares discriminant analyses.

Umbilical cord plasma from LBW and control newborns displayed a clearly differentiated metabolic profile.

Seven metabolites were identified that discriminate the LBW from the control group. LBW newborns had lower levels of choline, proline, glutamine, alanine and glucose than the control newborns, while plasma levels of phenylalanine and citrulline were higher in LBW newborns (p<0.05).

No significant differences were found between the two groups of mothers.

Low birth weight newborns display a differential metabolomics profile as compared to those of normal birth weight, something not present in the mothers. The meaning and potential utility of the findings as biomarkers of risk need to be addressed in future studies.

written by Metabolomics

The ‘exposome’represents the accumulation of all environmental exposures across a lifetime. Top-down strategies are required to assess something this comprehensive, and could transform our understanding of how environmental factors affect human health.

Metabolic profiling (metabonomics/metabolomics) defines an individual’s metabolic phenotype, which is influenced by genotype, diet, lifestyle, health and xenobiotic exposure, and could also reveal intermediate biomarkers for disease risk that reflect adaptive response to exposure. We investigated changes in metabolism in volunteers living near a point source of environmental pollution: a closed zinc smelter with associated elevated levels of environmental cadmium.
High-resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy (metabonomics) was used to acquire urinary metabolic profiles from 178 human volunteers.

The spectral data were subjected to multivariate and univariate analysis to identify metabolites that were correlated with lifestyle or biological factors. Urinary levels of 8-oxo deoxyguanosine were also measured, using mass spectrometry, as a marker of systemic oxidative stress.

written by Metabolomics

Environmental and intrinsic stress factors can result in the global alteration of yeast physiology, as evidenced by several transcriptional studies. Hypoxia has been shown to have a beneficial effect on the expression recombinant proteins in Pichia pastoris growing on glucose.

Furthermore, transcriptional profiling analyses revealed that oxygen availability was strongly affecting ergosterol biosynthesis, central carbon metabolism and stress responses, in particular the unfolded protein response. To better understand the effect and interplay of oxygen availability and foreign protein secretion on central metabolism, a first quantitative metabolomic analysis of free amino acids pools in a recombinant P.

pastoris strain growing under different oxygen availability conditions has been performed.

However, observed changes in individual amino acids pools were not correlated with their corresponding relative abundance in the recombinant protein sequence, but to the overall cell protein amino acid compositional variations

written by Metabolomics