Current challenges in metabolomics for diabetes research: a vital functional genomic tool or just a ploy for gaining funding?
Open Access
- 1 June 2008
- journal article
- Published by American Physiological Society in Physiological Genomics
- Vol. 34 (1), 1-5
- https://doi.org/10.1152/physiolgenomics.00009.2008
Abstract
Metabolomics aims to profile all the small molecule metabolites found within a cell, tissue, organ, or organism and use this information to understand a biological manipulation such as a drug intervention or a gene knockout. While neither mass spectrometry or NMR spectroscopy, the two most commonly used analytical tools in metabolomics, can provide a complete coverage of the metabolome, compared with other functional genomic tools for profiling biological moieties the approach is cheap and high throughput. In diabetes and obesity research this has provided the opportunity to assess large human populations or investigate a range of different tissues in animal studies both rapidly and cheaply. However, the approach has a number of major challenges, particularly with the interpretation of the data obtained. For example, some key pathways are better represented by high concentration metabolites inside the cell, and thus, the coverage of the metabolome may become biased towards these pathways (e.g., the TCA cycle, amino acid metabolism). There is also the challenge of statistically modeling datasets with large numbers of variables but relatively small sample sizes. This perspective discusses our own experience of some of the benefits and pitfalls with using metabolomics to understand diseases associated with type 2 diabetes.Keywords
This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
- Alterations in Myocardial Cardiolipin Content and Composition Occur at the Very Earliest Stages of Diabetes: A Shotgun Lipidomics StudyBiochemistry, 2007
- PPAR gamma 2 Prevents Lipotoxicity by Controlling Adipose Tissue Expandability and Peripheral Lipid MetabolismPLoS Genetics, 2007
- Direct quantitative trait locus mapping of mammalian metabolic phenotypes in diabetic and normoglycemic rat modelsNature Genetics, 2007
- NMR-based prediction of cardiovascular risk in diabetesNature Medicine, 2007
- Acquired Obesity Is Associated with Changes in the Serum Lipidomic Profile Independent of Genetic Effects – A Monozygotic Twin StudyPLOS ONE, 2007
- Diagnosing diabetic nephropathy by 1H NMR metabonomics of serumMagnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine, 2006
- A combined 1H NMR and HPLC–MS-based metabonomic study of urine from obese (fa/fa) Zucker and normal Wistar-derived ratsJournal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, 2005
- An integrated reverse functional genomic and metabolic approach to understanding orotic acid-induced fatty liverPhysiological Genomics, 2004
- 'Metabonomics': understanding the metabolic responses of living systems to pathophysiological stimuli via multivariate statistical analysis of biological NMR spectroscopic dataXenobiotica, 1999
- Human erythrocyte metabolism studies by 1H spin echo NMRFEBS Letters, 1977