Metabolic Regulatory Network Alterations in Response to Acute Cold Stress and Ginsenoside Intervention

Abstract

Acute stress may trigger systemic biochemical and physiological changes in living organisms, leading to a rapid loss of homeostasis, which can be gradually reinstated by self-regulatory mechanisms and/ or drug intervention strategy. However, such a sophisticated metabolic regulatory process has so far been poorly understood, especially from a holistic view. Urinary metabolite profiling of SpragueDawley rats exposed to cold temperature (-10°C) for 2 h using GC/MS in conjunction with modern multivariate statistical techniques revealed drastic biochemical changes as evidenced by fluctuations of urinary metabolites and demonstrated the protective effect of total ginsenosides (TGs) in ginseng extracts on stressed rats. The metabonomics approach enables us to visualize significant alterations in metabolite expression patterns as a result of stress-induced metabolic responses and post-stress compensation, and drug intervention. Several major metabolic pathways including catecholamines, glucocorticoids, the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, tryptophan (nicotinate), and gut microbiota metabolites were identified to be involved in metabolic regulation and compensation required to restore homeostasis.

Alteration of a Human Intestinal Microbiota under Extreme Life Environment in the Antarctica

“…The exposure to cold stress altered the urinary excretion level of some metabolites which are believed to be produced by the gut microbial community. 15,31) Human physiological responses to cold exposure are systemic and extensive.…”

“…And, the above-mentioned changes of metabolic patterns by cold stress affect the composition of human intestinal bacteria. 15) Furthermore, a change of food intake which could affect the gastrointestinal microbiota by altering and/or …”

“…As a result, some animal studies have been conducted instead of clinical studies with human. [15][16][17][18][19][20] Six members whose mission is to investigate and collect meteorites explored the Sør Rondane Mountains in Antarctica for three months. They are exposed to extremely low temperature and strong ultraviolet radiation during the expedition and maybe suffer stress by carrying out their missions, possibly followed by alteration of HIM.…”

Metabolic profiling reveals the protective effect of diammonium glycyrrhizinate on acute hepatic injury induced by carbon tetrachloride

“…Metabolic profiling of biological samples using GC/MS has been extensively used to evaluate the toxic/disease status and test the efficacy of drug treatment (Pan et al 2010;Qiu et al 2007;Wang et al 2007). This technology provides quantitative information on metabolite levels increase or decrease in response to xenobiotic interventions, especially in hepatotoxicity research (Chen et al 2009;Beger et al 2010;Sun et al 2009).…”

A serum metabolomic investigation on lipoprotein lipase-deficient mice with hyperlipidemic pancreatitis using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry

“…P<0.05 was considered statistically significant. GC/MS data files were converted into NetCDF format via DataBridge (PerkinElmer, Inc.) and pretreatment was conducted as previously described (8). The mean-centered and autoscaled data were then introduced into SIMCA-P 11.5 Software (Umetrics, Umeå, Sweden) for multivariate statistical analysis.…”