Rumen and plasma metabolomics profiling by UHPLC-QTOF/MS revealed metabolic alterations associated with a high-corn diet in beef steers

Abstract

High-grain diets are strongly associated with metabolic disorders in beef steers. Metabolomics can be used to explore the relationship between diet and metabolic changes, but no study has reported rumen and plasma metabolomics profiling associated with increasing dietary corn proportions in the diet of beef steers. Therefore, 12 steers paired according to similar body weights and body condition scores were randomly allocated to one of two diets: a low-corn (28.76%) diet (LCD) with a 40:60 ratio of concentrate to roughage and a high-corn (48.76%) diet (HCD) with a 60:40 ratio of concentrate to roughage. Metabolomics profiling by ultra-high-performance liquid tandem chromatography quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOF/MS) showed that steers fed the HCD had increased rumen and plasma carbohydrate metabolites and amino acids, which contributed to the growth of the beef steers. However, the rumen acidity and ruminal and plasma lipopolysaccharide (LPS) concentrations significantly increased with the increase amounts of corn in the diet. In total, 717 rumen metabolites and 386 plasma metabolites were identified. By multivariate analysis, 144 rumen and 56 plasma metabolites were further identified that were significantly different between the two groups (P < 0.05 and variable influence on projection > 1). The differential metabolites in the rumen and plasma were associated with different metabolic pathways, and phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan biosynthesis and phenylalanine metabolism were common key metabolic pathways for the two biofluids. In conclusion, the high-corn diet improved the growth performance of beef steers but decreased the ruminal pH and increased the LPS and harmful metabolites in the rumen and blood, which has implications for the incidence of metabolic diseases. The identified differential metabolites in both the rumen and plasma and the related metabolic pathways may contribute to the exploration of potential biomarkers for high-corn diet-based metabolic diseases.

Effects of the acid–base treatment of corn on rumen fermentation and microbiota, inflammatory response and growth performance in beef cattle fed high-concentrate diet

“…In practical beef production, cattle are often fed highconcentrate diet (HCD) to meet high energy demand in order to achieve maximum production (Ye et al, 2016). Highconcentrate diet is rich in carbohydrate that can lead to rapid ruminal production of organic acids like short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) which are the major energy source for the ruminant host (McCann et al, 2016).…”

Review: Ruminal microbiome and microbial metabolome: effects of diet and ruminant host

“…Metabolomic techniques to describe a potentially wider range of metabolites have been used to study the link between gut microbiomes and the metabolome in several gut ecosystems (Dougal et al, 2012;Yan et al, 2017). In rumen-based studies, metabolomics has been used to investigate the effect of diet (O'Callaghan et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2018) to link the host genotype to efficient phenotypes in growing cattle (Artegoitia et al, 2017); the main aim has been to help to elucidate the effects of early-life nutritional interventions on rumen function (Abecia et al, 2018) and to understand the effect of plant extracts on rumen function (Wang et al, 2019). While metabolomics provides a route to achieving a link between taxonomic-based studies and metabolic function, the current techniques are difficult to compare between studies with both extraction technique (Ribeiro de Almeida et al, 2018) and analysis technique (Goldansaz et al, 2017) contributing to differences between studies.…”

Untargeted Metabolomics of Fermented Rice Using UHPLC Q-TOF MS/MS Reveals an Abundance of Potential Antihypertensive Compounds

“…Among the techniques commonly used, LC-MS is the most used in metabolomic studies due to its detection sensitivity, high resolution, and nonderivatization of samples [21]. Ultra-high-performance liquid tandem chromatography quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOF/MS) is a new approach in chromatography and was developed based on LC-MS to determine and quantify more metabolites [22]. In this study, we determined the ACE inhibitory ability of destarched rice before and after Prozyme 2000p treatment and after fermentation.…”