Metabonomic Analysis Reveal the CCl4-Induced Systems Alterations for Multiple Rat Organs

Recently, the group of Biospectroscopy and Metabonomics in Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics (WIPM, CAS), led by Professor Tang Huiru, has made progress on the study of metabolic profiles alterations in multiple rat organs caused by model hepatotoxin CCl4. The results of this study has been published on Journal of Proteome Research, 2012, 11 (7), 3848–3859 (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/pr3003529).

CCl4-induced metabonomic changes had been extensively studied for mammalian liver, but such changes had not been reported for other organs. To investigate the CCl4 effects on multiple organs, Dr. Jiang Limiao, with other investigator, analyzed the CCl4-induced metabonomic changes in rat liver, kidney, lung, and spleen using 1H NMR-based metabonomics approaches with complementary information on serum clinical chemistry and histopathology. They found that acute CCl4 exposure not only influenced the metabolism and function of rat liver, but also had significant systematic impact on the metabolism and function of rat kidney, lung and spleen, i.e., renal osmotic regulations, protein catabolism in rat lung, carbohydrate glycolysis and nucleotide catabolism in rat spleen. The mechanisms of these observations were closely related to the oxidative stress caused by CCl4. The results suggested that additional attentions to the “non-targeted” organs should be paid in toxicological studies, which would provide novel insights for systems toxicological studies.