Metabonomics Research Progress on Liver Diseases

Table 2

The main results of clinical and experimental metabolomic studies on ALD.

Reference	Methods	Sample	Main findings
[19]	CE-TOF-MS	Serum	19 metabolites associated with alcohol intake, and three biomarker candidates (threonine, guanidinosuccinate, and glutamine) were related to alcohol-induced liver injury. Glutamate/glutamine ratio might also be good biomarker.
[20]	HPLC-ion trap-MS	Urine	Seven metabolites were identified, including creatinine, indole-3-carboxylic acid, indole-3-lactic acid, L-tryptophan, L-serine, L-leucine, and glutathione.
[21]	^1H-NMR	Serum	Metabolites significantly increased with large HCC were glutamate, acetate, and N-acetyl glycoproteins; metabolites that correlated with cirrhosis were lipids and glutamine. Metabolomic profiles of small HCC patients were similar to those of large HCC group.
[22]	UPLC-ESI-QTOF-MS	Urine	Indole-3-lactic acid and phenyllactic acid may serve as robust noninvasive biomarkers for early stages of ALD.
[23]	UPLC-QTOF-MS	Serum	Five metabolic pathways were identified, namely, phenylalanine and tyrosine metabolism, leucine degradation, tryptophan metabolism, sphingolipid metabolism, and glycerophospholipid metabolism. Serum LPCs showed disease-specific changes, probably reflecting metabolic difference between liver injury and HCCX in nude mice.

CE-TOF-MS: capillary electrophoresis time-of-flight mass spectrometry.
UPLC-ESI-QTOF-MS: ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry.