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Metabolic profiling of gender: Headspace-SPME/GC–MS and 1H NMR analysis of urine

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Abstract

This study aims to investigate the metabolic difference between male and female healthy adults using a combination of GC–MS and NMR metabolomics techniques. While metabolomics has shown wide applications in characterizing the status and progression of many diseases, physiological factors such as gender often contribute high levels of variability that can hinder the detection of biomarkers of interest, such as in disease detection. We carried out a detailed exploration of gender related metabolic profiling of human urine using a Headspace-SPME/GC–MS approach and detected over two hundred peaks. Fifty-nine metabolites were identified using the NIST library. 1H NMR spectroscopy was also utilized, and resulted in the identification of eighteen metabolites. We find that both GC–MS and NMR are able to capture human gender metabolic differences, and their combination allows a significantly better understanding of this difference. Subtle differences between genders are found to be related to the metabolism of fats, amino acids, and TCA cycle intermediates.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Purdue University. Daniel Raftery is a member of the Purdue Center for Cancer Research and Oncological Sciences Center. The authors thank all the volunteers who contributed their urine samples. Loan of GC–MS instrumentation from the Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education, Discovery Learning Center is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Lingyan Liu, Tao Ye & Daniel Raftery

  2. Division of Clinical Research, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 98102, USA

    Shucha Zhang

  3. Discovery Learning Research Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Debora Steffen

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  1. Shucha Zhang
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  2. Lingyan Liu
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  3. Debora Steffen
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  4. Tao Ye
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  5. Daniel Raftery
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Correspondence to Daniel Raftery.

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Zhang, S., Liu, L., Steffen, D. et al. Metabolic profiling of gender: Headspace-SPME/GC–MS and 1H NMR analysis of urine. Metabolomics 8, 323–334 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-011-0315-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-011-0315-2

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