Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of COVID-19 Global Metabolomics Datasets

Abstract

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has spread across the world since 2019, causing a global pandemic. The pathogenesis of the viral infection and the associated clinical presentations depend primarily on host factors such as age and immunity, rather than the viral load or its genetic variations. A growing number of omics studies have been conducted to characterize the host immune and metabolic responses underlying the disease progression. Meta-analyses of these datasets have great potential to identify robust molecular signatures to inform clinical care and to facilitate therapeutics development. In this study, we performed a comprehensive meta-analysis of publicly available global metabolomics datasets obtained from three countries (United States, China and Brazil). To overcome high heterogeneity inherent in these datasets, we have (a) implemented a computational pipeline to perform consistent raw spectra processing; (b) conducted meta-analyses at pathway levels instead of individual feature levels; and (c) performed visual data mining on consistent patterns of change between disease severities for individual studies. Our analyses have yielded several key metabolic signatures characterizing disease progression and clinical outcomes. Their biological interpretations were discussed within the context of the current literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive meta-analysis of global metabolomics datasets of COVID-19.

Targeted Metabolomics Identifies High Performing Diagnostic and Prognostic Biomarkers for COVID-19

“…Signi cant alterations in the kynurenine pathway have also been reported for COVID-19 patients 11,19 . Thus, this study reinforces the ndings that amino acid pathways (especially tryptophan) are signi cantly dysregulated in COVID-19 infection 10 .…”

“…As a result, pyruvate will be converted to lactate due to aerobic glycolysis, which is also known as the Warburg effect 33 . Thus, a reduction in TCA metabolism would lead to an antioxidant imbalance and in ammatory damage 10 , as seen by the increased levels of polyamines and methionine sulfoxide found among hospitalized patients in this study. the RT-PCR test (AUC:0.83) 35 .…”

“…Studies with COVID-19 patients using untargeted or targeted metabolomics have consistently shown increased levels of glucose, free fatty acids, sphingomyelins and triglycerides, as well as changes in serum tryptophan metabolism [7][8][9][10][11][12] . As a result, various potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers have been proposed.…”

Metabolic Profiling from an Asymptomatic Ferret Model of SARS-CoV-2 Infection

“…For example, COVID-19 health care practitioners account for energy expenditure increases of up to 10% during asymptomatic viral infections [34]. Such a decrease in the citrate cycle metabolism would cause an imbalance of the anti-oxidization mechanism and inflammatory damage [35]. During the shedding period, the downregulation of citrate correlated with a significant increase in glutamate and arginine metabolisms.…”

Assessing Dynamic Changes of Taste-Related Primary Metabolism During Ripening of Durian Pulp Using Metabolomic and Transcriptomic Analyses

“…The metabolite data were processed by algorithms in MetaboAnalyst 5.0 1 (Pang et al, 2021). Principal component analysis (PCA), which is a dimension-reduction tool, was applied to investigate the relationships between samples.…”