Metabolomics and its application to studying metal toxicity

Abstract

Here we explain the omics approach of metabolomics and how it can be applied to study a physiological response to toxic metal exposure. This review aims to educate the metallomics field to the tool of metabolomics. Metabolomics is becoming an increasingly used tool to compare natural and challenged states of various organisms, from disease states in humans to toxin exposure to environmental systems. This approach is key to understanding and identifying the cellular or biochemical targets of metals and the underlying physiological response. Metabolomics steps are described and overviews of its application to metal toxicity to organisms are given. As this approach is very new there are yet only a small number of total studies and therefore only a brief overview of some metal metabolomics studies is described. A frank critical evaluation of the approach is given to provide newcomers to the method a clear idea of the challenges and the rewards of applying metabolomics to their research.

Omics technologies and their applications to evaluate metal toxicity in mice M. spretus as a bioindicator

“…This information is of great value in several issues such as risk assessment of chemicals in the environment, study of mode of action (MOA) of toxicants and discovery of indicators for the health of animals. In particular, the use of metabolomics to study metal toxicity is gaining importance in recent years [68]. In metabolomics we consider molecules with molecular mass less than 1000 Da, which are usually intermediate metabolites and end products of cellular functions, and their levels can be considered as the response of biological systems to environmental or genetic manipulation.…”

Metal Species in Biology: Bottom-Up and Top-Down LC Approaches in Applied Toxicological Research

“…In principle, one has to distinguish between perturbations that may be detected within minutes after an appropriate dose of a particular toxin has been added to blood plasma in vitro [26] or administered to animals [183] and perturbations that are only detectable in blood plasma or erythrocyte lysate after a given model organism has been exposed to a particular toxin for weeks or months [184,185]. With regard to the nature of these perturbations, one must distinguish between those that are displayed at the mRNAlevel [186], the small molecule level [13,17], the protein level [12], and those at the metalloprotein level [26,75]. At present, numerous proteomic approaches are available to visualize changes of any given proteome over time, such as increased or decreased concentrations of specific proteins (e.g., in erythrocyte lysate [75]), but many of these techniques are time consuming, expensive, and incapable of detecting changes at the metalloprotein level.…”

“…In the context of separation science these LC techniques allowed, for the first time, to analyze complicated biological fluids, such as blood plasma for proteins [10][11][12] or small molecular weight metabolites [13,14] and put analytical chemists in the unique position to tackle biological complexity. Advances in LC technology have therefore played a pivotal role in setting the stage for modern proteomics [15], metabonomics/metabolomics [16][17][18], and systems biology research [19]. Concomitant with 2 ISRN Chromatography these technological developments, a variety of separation mechanisms were established which allowed LC to become an indispensable tool for the purification of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), such as blood coagulation factors from plasma and recombinant proteins from bacterial lysates [20].…”

Analysis of the metabolic pathways affected by hot-Humid or dry climate based on fecal metabolomics coupled with serum metabolic changes in broiler chickens

“…Metabolomics is a novel technology with great potential for environmental changes research and provides a unique perspective on hot humid or dry-induced changes in cellular metabolism [24].…”