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Identification of biochemical changes in lactovegetarian urine using 1H NMR spectroscopy and pattern recognition

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Abstract

A vegetarian diet has been demonstrated to have a profound influence on human metabolism as well as to aid the prevention of several chronic diseases relative to an omnivorous diet. However, there have been no systematic metabolomic studies on all of the biochemical changes induced in human subjects by long-term vegetarianism. In this study, 1H NMR spectroscopy in combination with multivariate statistical analysis was applied to explore the variability in the metabolic urinary profiles of healthy populations from four groups: lactovegetarian male (VEGMALE), lactovegetarian female (VEGFEMALE), omnivorous male (OMNMALE), and omnivorous female (OMNFEMALE). Differences in metabolic profiles were examined in relation to diet and gender by principal component analysis (PCA) and spectral integrals. It was found that the most influential low molecular weight metabolites responsible for the differences between the diet groups were N-acetyl glycoprotein (NAG), succinate, citrate, trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), taurine, glycine, hippurate, phenylalanine, methylhistidine and formate, whereas for the differences in gender groups the most discriminatory metabolites were NAG, succinate, creatinine, arginine, TMAO, taurine, hippurate, mannitol, phenylalanine, and methylhistidine. The results from the PCA of all four groups indicated that diet plays a greater role in influencing metabolite differences than gender. As an exploration, this work shows the potential of metabolomics when applied to nutritional and physiological studies, and it will aid further studies.

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Abbreviations

VEGMALE:

Lactovegetarian male

VEGFEMALE:

Lactovegetarian female

OMNMALE:

Omnivorous male

OMNFEMALE:

Omnivorous female

PCA:

Principal component analysis

NAG:

N-Acetyl glycoprotein

DMA:

Dimethylamine

TMAO:

Trimethylamine-N-oxide

ATP:

Adenosine triphosphate

TCA:

Tricarboxylic acid

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Prof. Jules Griffin (Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge) for his careful revision of our manuscript. This work was supported by the Science Research Foundation of the Ministry of Health & United Fujian Provincial Health and Education Project for Tackling the Key Research (WKJ2008-2-36), the Key Project of Health and Science and Technology of Xiamen (3502Z20051027), the Project of Science and Technology Bureau of Xiamen (WSK0501), the NNSF of China (10875101), and the NSF of the Fujian Province of China (2009 J01299).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Fujian Key Laboratory of Plasma and Magnetic Resonance, State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, China

    Jingjing Xu, Shuhui Cai, Jiyang Dong & Zhong Chen

  2. The First Hospital of Xiamen Affiliated to the Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361001, China

    Shuyu Yang & Xuejun Li

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  1. Jingjing Xu
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Correspondence to Shuhui Cai or Xuejun Li.

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Xu, J., Yang, S., Cai, S. et al. Identification of biochemical changes in lactovegetarian urine using 1H NMR spectroscopy and pattern recognition. Anal Bioanal Chem 396, 1451–1463 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-009-3338-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-009-3338-z

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