Effects of short-term dietary restriction on plasma metabolites and the subcutaneous fat area according to metabolic status in obese individuals: a case-control study

Anti-obesity mechanism of Ganpu tea revealed by microbiome, metabolome and transcriptome analyses

In this study, the anti-obesity mechanism of Ganpu tea (GPT) from the perspectives of microbiome, metabolome and transcriptome was investigated. GPT significantly reduced the high-fat-diet (HFD)-induced levels of inflammatory cytokines and the expansion of lipid droplets and white adipose tissue. GPT also improved HFD-induced gut microbiome imbalance by significantly reducing the proportion of Firmicutes to Bacteroidota. Metabolomic data showed that HFD-induced metabolic disorder was regulated by GPT and probably characterised by being related to 4-aminobutyraldehyde and 5-acetylamino-6-amino-3-methyluracil. Transcriptome showed that the improvement of obesity was mainly related to the IL-17 signaling pathway and the metabolism of xenobiotics by cytochrome P450. Spearman's correlation analysis indicated that gut microbiota were significantly correlated with inflammatory factors, genes and metabolites. Metabolome-transcriptome analysis showed that GPT reversed obesity mainly through the carbohydrate metabolism, amino acid metabolism and lipid metabolism.Collectively, GPT may be used as a health drink to prevent or treat obesity.

Metabolic profile of exhaled breath condensate from the pneumonia patients

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) is increasingly being used for disease diagnosis and environmental exposure assessment as a noninvasive method reducing the risk of exposure. The purpose of this study was to investigate the application of a new sample type of EBC in pneumonia by metabolomics and to explore differential metabolites and potential metabolic pathways.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A case-control study was performed at the Peking University Third Hospital from August to December 2020. C-MS/MS analyses were performed on EBC samples using a UHPLC system.

RESULTS

Totally 22 patients with pneumonia and 24 healthy controls were recruited. Using untargeted metabolomics based on LC-MS/MS analysis, 25 kinds of differential metabolites were found. Through a comprehensive analysis of the pathways in which the differential metabolites were located, the key pathway with the highest correlation with the difference of metabolites was taurine and hypotaurine metabolism.

CONCLUSIONS

The study implicates that the hypotaurine/taurine metabolic pathway may play a role on the development of pneumonia through metabolism analysis on EBC and the 3-Sulfinoalanine may be used as a biomarker in the diagnosis of pneumonia.