Metabolomic Profiles of a Midge (Procladius villosimanus, Kieffer) Are Associated with Sediment Contamination in Urban Wetlands

Abstract

Metabolomic techniques are powerful tools for investigating organism-environment interactions. Metabolite profiles have the potential to identify exposure or toxicity before populations are disrupted and can provide useful information for environmental assessment. However, under complex environmental scenarios, metabolomic responses to exposure can be distorted by background and/or organismal variation. In the current study, we use LC-MS (liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) and GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) to measure metabolites of the midge Procladius villosimanus inhabiting 21 urban wetlands. These metabolites were tested against common sediment contaminants using random forest models and metabolite enrichment analysis. Sediment contaminant concentrations in the field correlated with several P. villosimanus metabolites despite natural environmental and organismal variation. Furthermore, enrichment analysis indicated that metabolite sets implicated in stress responses were enriched, pointing to specific cellular functions affected by exposure. Methionine metabolism, sugar metabolism and glycerolipid metabolism associated with total petroleum hydrocarbon and metal concentrations, while mitochondrial electron transport and urea cycle sets associated only with bifenthrin. These results demonstrate the potential for metabolomics approaches to provide useful information in field-based environmental assessments.

(Xeno)metabolomics for the evaluation of aquatic organism’s exposure to field contaminated water

“…[30] applied an additional clean-up procedure with Nunc 96-well plates while Jeppe et.al. [31] only analysed the polar fraction.…”

“…Two analytical platforms are mainly used to carry out metabolomics studies: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) employed in 9 studies [17][18][19][20][21][22]27,28,40], low-or highresolution Mass Spectrometry (MS or HRMS) in 16 [7,21,[35][36][37][38][39][40]22,25,26,[29][30][31][32][33], whereas both instrumental set-ups were applied in 3 out of 22 papers.…”

“…However, information about any other ion from the matrix not included in the acquisition list will not be obtained a posteriori. This strategy has been followed in 7 of the papers published [7,17,25,27,28,30,31] (Table 1).…”

“…Other studies have employed both target and non-target strategies with more than a single analytical platform (combining NMR with MS, or LC-MS with GC-MS) to obtain widened information [17,21,28,31]. However, with the continuous increase in sensitivity of HRMS instruments combined with their versatility, the use of a single instrument in full-scan acquisition (in the so-called data independent or data dependent acquisition modes) have made possible to perform both kind of analysis in the same run.…”

Metabolomics of Dry Versus Reanimated Antarctic Lichen-Dominated Endolithic Communities

“…Microbial community metabolomics is recently providing a new route to establish stress-response and survival strategies in environmental samples [ 40 , 41 ]. A recent liquid chromatography (LC)—mass spectrometry (MS) based untargeted metabolomics—study compared the responses of two endolithic communities collected in the same locality in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, but subjected to very different environmental pressure due to south and north exposure of the rock surface [ 42 ].…”