Valeria Righi1, Caterina Constantinou2, Nikolaos Psychogios3, Julie Wilhelmy4, Michael Mindrinos4, Laurence G. Rahme2, Aria A. Tzika3
1NMR Surgical Laboratory, Department of Surgery , Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Burns Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston , MA, United States; 2Molecular Surgery Laboratory, Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Burn Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 3NMR Surgical Laboratory, Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Burns Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 4Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, United States
We applied HRMAS 1H NMR metabolomics to intact muscle samples from animals treated with a volatile aromatic low molecular weight molecule, 2-AA, in order to identify at high-resolution concomitant metabolic and molecular aberrations associated with insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction. These changes might also reflect mitochondrial dysfunction, as some of the genes downregulated in response to 2-AA treatment encode mitochondrial-dependent metabolic functions. The strength of HRMAS is that it allows dual investigation of metabolic and molecular changes since the same specimens studied with HRMAS can subsequently be used for transcriptome studies.