Investigating potential mechanisms of obesity by metabolomics.
Obesity is a serious health problem with an increased risk of several common diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Metabolomics is an emerging analytical technique for systemic determination of metabolite profiles, which is useful for understanding the biochemical changes in obesity or related diseases both in individual organs and at the organism level. Increasingly, this technology has been applied to the study of obesity, complementing transcriptomics and/or proteomics analyses. Indeed, the alterations of metabolites in biofluids/tissues are direct indicators of variations in physiology or pathology. In this paper, we will examine the obesity-related alterations in significant metabolites that have been identified by metabolomics as well as their metabolic pathway associations. Issues concerning the screening of biologically significant metabolites related to obesity will also be discussed.
School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
Baogang
B
Xie
Michael J
MJ
Waters
Horst Joachim
HJ
Schirra
D000818:Animals; D035843:Biomedical Research; D006801:Humans; D055432:Metabolomics; D009765:Obesity / Q000378:metabolism*