Metabolomics of lung cancer: Analytical platforms and their applications

Abstract

Lung cancer is the leading type of cancer worldwide in terms of the number of new cases and is responsible for the largest number of deaths due to poor prognosis and difficult early detection. Due to its ability to detect numerous small molecular metabolites simultaneously, metabolomics has been widely used for the assessment of global metabolic changes in a living organism to discover candidate biomarkers for cancer diagnosis, investigate the development of cancer, and provide insights into the underlying pathophysiology. This review will mainly describe recent developments in lung cancer metabolomics in terms of early‐stage detection, biomarker discovery and mechanism exploration by using nuclear magnetic resonance, liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, and capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry in the last 10 years. The sample collection and metabolite extraction methods are also summarized.

A metabolomic study of the urine of rats with Alzheimer's disease and the efficacy of Ding‐Zhi‐Xiao‐Wan on the afflicted rats

“…Metabolomics is the systematic identification and/or quantification of small molecule metabolites in biological fluids, cells, and tissues [10,11]. MS is one of the main techniques of metabolomics research because of its high sensitivity, high reproducibility, and wide dynamic range [12,13].…”

Metabolomic analysis in ophthalmology

“…Two approaches of metabolomic study can be distinguished -untargeted and targeted metabolomics 1,6 .…”

“…The main goal is to classify phenotypes based on metabolite pattern. This approach is related to hypothesis generation and is mainly used for biomarker discovery 6 . As a result, a large amount of highly complex data is generated requiring high performance bioinformatics tools 7 .…”

“…Advantage of NMR spectroscopy is its ability to provide structural information for the identification of unknown metabolites with little or no sample preparation. A major drawback is its low sensitivity 6,13 .…”

High‐throughput metabolomics method based on liquid chromatography‐mass spectrometry: Insights into the underlying mechanisms of salinity–alkalinity exposure‐induced metabolites changes in Barbus capito

“…Metabolomics as a branch of systems biology has ability to probe into metabolic patterns through a detailed investigation of the metabolite and pathways changes in living systems [14,15]. It has been increasingly applied in the fields of drug safety and disease biomarker discovery by performing the qualitative and quantitative analysis of small molecule metabolites in biological sample [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Recently, MS-based metabolomics has been successfully employed to assess the effect of environmental factors on fish.…”