Metabolomics and Network Biology: sex comparative analysis of mouse brain regional metabolic physiology

摘要

Abstract: Mammalian brain is considered the most complex and multi-scale organ of the body. However, its biochemistry is not extensively studied and there is need for a systemic and systematic investigation in the context of variation among brain regions and between sexes. Towards that, systems biology, and especially metabolomics, allowed neuroscientists to move from the study of individual molecules or circuits to a systems-level perspective of the complexity of brain metabolism. Additionally, network and systems biology have contributed greatly to the attempt of reconstruction an accurate metabolic network activity map. Given that, we present in this work the value of studying brain central carbon metabolism in the context of metabolic network reconstruction using metabolomics. More specifically, the aim of this work is to study the metabolic physiology of brain, based on the comparative analysis of the metabolic profile of male and female Balb-c/J mice in three brain regions, i.e. cortex, midbrain and hippocampus, using GC-MS metabolomics. Our results demonstrate the significant variation in the metabolic profiles between the various brain regions and between sexes, confirming the need for this variation to be considered in the interpretation of the brain metabolomic data.