Emerging role of metabolomics in protein conformational disorders

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Metabolomics focuses on interactions among different metabolites associated with various cellular functions in cells, tissues, and organs. In recent years, metabolomics has emerged as a powerful tool to identify perturbed metabolites, pathways influenced by the environment, for protein conformational diseases (PCDs) and also offers wide clinical application.

Area Covered: This review provides a brief overview of recent advances in metabolomics as applied to identify metabolic variations in PCDs, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, prion disease, and cardiac amyloidosis. The ‘PubMed’ and ‘Google Scholar’ database search methods have been used to screen the published reports with key search terms: metabolomics, biomarkers, and protein conformational disorders.

Expert opinion: Metabolomics is the large-scale study of metabolites and is deemed to overwhelm other omics. It plays a crucial role in finding variations in diseases due to protein conformational changes. However, many PCDs are yet to be identified. Metabolomics is still an emerging field; there is a need for new high-resolution analytical techniques and more studies need to be carried out to generate new information.

KEYWORDS:

• Metabolomics
• biomarker
• protein conformational diseases
• proteinopathies
• metabonomics

Article highlights

• Metabolomics has emerged as a powerful and robust tool for identifying biomarkers and significant insight into pathogenesis related to diseases.

• Various proteinopathies, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, prion disease, and cardiac amyloidosis, with a special emphasis on metabolite markers for the prevention and control of amyloid-associated disorders, are being studied using different techniques.

• Studies have elucidated that these metabolic alterations significantly change the pathways associated with biological processes, such as glucose metabolism, brain insulin resistance, and the TCA cycle.

• It is concluded that relatively few metabolite alterations are responsible for the onset of neurodegenerative disorders.

• Many protein conformational diseases are still poorly understood. Therefore, further metabolomic studies are needed to identify the molecular basis of these diseases.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Govt. of India for providing Senior Research Fellowship to Nimisha Gupta, Grant No. 3/1/2(4)/Nephrology/2019-NCD-II.