Lysophosphatidylcholine profiling of plasma: discrimination of isomers and discovery of lung cancer biomarkers

Abstract

Lysophosphatidylcholines (lysoPCs) are a class of compounds that have a constant polar head, and fatty acyls of different chain lengths, position, degrees of saturation, and double bond location in human plasma. LysoPCs levels can be a clinical diagnostic indicator that reveals pathophysiological changes. In this work, a method was developed to discriminate between different types of lysoPCs using reversed phase ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry, using mass spectrometry MS E . Isomeric lysoPCs were distinguished based on retention time and the peak intensity ratio of product ions, and 14 pairs of lysoPCs regioisomers were identified in human plasma. The plasma samples of 12 lung cancer patients and 12 healthy persons were collected and analyzed by principal component analysis to generate metabolic profiles of the identified lysoPCs. Both electrospray ionization ESI? and ESIresults showed that all lung cancer patients had the same five lysoPC metabolic abnormalities, specifically in sn-1 lyso16:0, sn-2 lysoPC 16:0, sn-1 lysoPC 18:0, sn-1 lysoPC 18:1 and sn-1 lysoPC 18:2. Thus, the function of isomers with different fatty acyl positions may be related to lung cancer, and this may help elucidate the mechanism of the disease.

UPLC-based metabonomic applications for discovering biomarkers of diseases in clinical chemistry

“…UPLC-based metabonomics was used to find potential biomarkers by [53,54]. Decreased LPCs may be explained by Lands' cycle pathway.…”

Metabolic Signatures of Lung Cancer in Biofluids: NMR-Based Metabonomics of Blood Plasma

“…27 In another MS study of specific compounds, namely, lysophosphatidylcholines (lysoPC), abnormal levels of lysoPC isomers with different fatty acyl positions were found in the plasma of lung cancer patients compared to controls. 28 Using a more global profiling approach, Jordan and colleagues reported the NMR analysis of paired tissue and serum samples from 14 subjects with two different lung cancer histological types (adenocarcinoma and squamous cell This exploratory study, although involving a limited number of samples, showed the potential of serum NMR metabonomics to differentiate between the two lung cancer types, as well as between cancer patients and controls. In addition to cancer, plasma metabolic profiling has also been applied to investigate other lung disorders, namely, severe childhood pneumonia 30 and sepsis-induced acute lung injury (ALI), 31 providing indication that distinct systemic metabolic signatures seem to be associated with different pulmonary pathologies.…”

Plasma metabolic profiling of normal and dysmenorrhea syndrome rats and the effects of Xiang–Fu–Si–Wu Decoction intervention

“…Owing to the lack of corresponding standard samples, all markers, except lysoPC(18:4), were identified solely according to the fragment ion on MS E and criteria of Jia et al (2008) and Liebisch et al (2002). Earlier literature (Bell-Parikh et al, 2003;Dong et al, 2010;Murphy et al, 2005) was further used to confirm the results. UHPLC-MS data from five normal rats and five dysmenorrhea syndrome rats after the administration of XFSWD at 30 min, 2 h, 6 h and 12 h revealed 376 peaks of negative ions and 122 peaks of positive ions, which were detected and processed via MarkerLynx using the same acquisition method and data fed to SIMCA-P for PLS, respectively.…”