Metabolic profile of exhaled breath condensate from the pneumonia patients

Abstract

Purpose of the Study

Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) is increasingly being used for disease diagnosis and environmental exposure assessment as a noninvasive method reducing the risk of exposure. The purpose of this study was to investigate the application of a new sample type of EBC in pneumonia by metabolomics and to explore differential metabolites and potential metabolic pathways.

Materials and Methods

A case-control study was performed at the Peking University Third Hospital from August to December 2020. C-MS/MS analyses were performed on EBC samples using a UHPLC system.

Results

Totally 22 patients with pneumonia and 24 healthy controls were recruited. Using untargeted metabolomics based on LC-MS/MS analysis, 25 kinds of differential metabolites were found. Through a comprehensive analysis of the pathways in which the differential metabolites were located, the key pathway with the highest correlation with the difference of metabolites was taurine and hypotaurine metabolism.

Conclusions

The study implicates that the hypotaurine/taurine metabolic pathway may play a role on the development of pneumonia through metabolism analysis on EBC and the 3-Sulfinoalanine may be used as a biomarker in the diagnosis of pneumonia.

Keywords:

• 3-Sulfinoalanine
• exhaled breath condensate
• metabonomic
• pneumonia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

Xiao-Guang Li, Qing-Bin Lu and Jie Xu conceived the study and designed the experiments. Xiao-Guang Li, Juan Du, Jie Xu and Qing-Bin Lu analyzed the data, prepared figures and tables, drafts of the paper, and approved the final draft. Jing Chen, Fei Lin, Wei Wang and Ting-Ting Wei collected the data and performed the investigations. All authors have approved the final draft and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Human ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals: All subjects signed informed consent. Informed consent forms were obtained, and approval for the study was attained under the Peking University Third Hospital Medical Science Research Ethics Committee 2020 (#079-02).

Data availability statement

The original dataset presented in this study included in the supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Joint Research Fund for Beijing Natural Science Foundation and Haidian Original Innovation (L202007), National Major Science and Technology Projects (2018ZX10732401-003) and Beijing Haidian District Preventive Medicine Fund (2017HDPMA04), Peking University Medicine Fund of Fostering Young Scholars’ Scientific & Technological Innovation (BMU2021PY005) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Peking University Health Science Center (BMU2021YJ041).