Nephrotoxicity has long been the most severe and life-threatening side-effect of cisplatin, whose anticancer effect is therefore restricted. Previous pathological studies have shown that both renal cortex and medulla could be injured by cisplatin. Our TUNEL (terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferasemediated dUTP nick end-labeling) assay results further uncovered that medulla subjected more severe injury than cortex. In order to depict the underlying metabolic mechanism of spatial difference in response to cisplatin, in the present study, mass spectrometry-based untargeted metabolomics approach was applied to profile renal cortex and medulla metabolites of rat after receiving a single dose of cisplatin (2.5, 5 or 10 mg/kg). Eventually, 53 and 55 differential metabolites in cortex and medulla were screened out, respectively. Random forest, orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis and metabolic cumulative fold change analysis revealed that metabolic changes in medulla were more obviously dose-dependent than those in cortex, which confirmed the conclusion that medulla was more sensitive to cisplatin exposure. Furthermore, 29 intermediates were recognized as the most contributive metabolites for the sensitivity difference. Metabolic pathways interrupted by cisplatin mainly included amino acid, energy, lipid, pyrimidine, purine, and creatine metabolism. Our findings provide new insight into the mechanism study of cisplatin-induced nephrotoxicity.Cisplatin [cis-diamminedichloroplatinum(II)] is an effective antineoplastic agent that was widely applied in the treatment of various types of solid tumors in the past several decades 1-3 . However, due to poor selectivity, cisplatin could cause neurotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, nausea and vomiting, and ototoxicity et al. in clinical [4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . As the principal excretory organ for cisplatin, kidney accumulates and retains platinum to a greater degree than other organs 11,12 . Therefore, nephrotoxicity has long been the most severe and life-threatening toxicity among these side-effects 13,14 . Statistics showed there were about 25-35% patients experienced a significant decline in renal function after receiving a single dose of cisplatin 13,15 . The declines manifested clinically as lower glomerular filtration rate, reduced serum magnesium and potassium levels et al. 13,16 . Research over the past few years has gained significant insights into the mechanisms regarding cisplatin nephrotoxicity, which mainly involved apoptosis, inflammation and oxidative stress et al. [17][18][19][20][21][22] . However, how the toxicity occurs and develops, and how various types of mechanisms are integrated to induce distinct kidney pathology, remain largely unknown.Metabolomics is an emerging -omics approach that could provide information of holistic and time-dependent metabolic variation in response to xenobiotic interventions 23,24 . At present, metabolomics analysis encompasses different strategies depending on the objective of study, namely target analysis of a group of c...