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Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified genetic loci associated with the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the molecular mechanisms by which they confer risk are largely unknown. We conducted a metabolome-wide association study (MWAS) of AD-associated loci from GWASs using untargeted metabolic profiling (metabolomics) by ultraperformance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS). We identified an association of lactosylceramides (LacCer) with AD-related single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in ABCA7 (P = 5.0 × 10-5 to 1.3 × 10-44). We showed that plasma LacCer concentrations are associated with cognitive performance and genetically modified levels of LacCer are associated with AD risk. We then showed that concentrations of sphingomyelins, ceramides, and hexosylceramides were altered in brain tissue from Abca7 knockout mice, compared with wild type (WT) (P = 0.049-1.4 × 10-5), but not in a mouse model of amyloidosis. Furthermore, activation of microglia increases intracellular concentrations of hexosylceramides in part through induction in the expression of sphingosine kinase, an enzyme with a high control coefficient for sphingolipid and ceramide synthesis. Our work suggests that the risk for AD arising from functional variations in ABCA7 is mediated at least in part through ceramides. Modulation of their metabolism or downstream signaling may offer new therapeutic opportunities for AD.

It is challenging to measure dietary exposure with techniques that are both accurate and applicable to free-living individuals. We performed a cross-over intervention, with 24 healthy individuals, to capture the acute metabolic response of a cereal breakfast (CB) and an egg and ham breakfast (EHB). Fasting and postprandial urine samples were analyzed using H-1 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and multivariate data analysis. Metabolic profiles were distinguished in relation to ingestion of either CB or EHB. Phosphocreatine/creatine and citrate were identified at higher concentrations after consumption of EHB. Beverage consumption (i.e., tea or coffee) could clearly be seen in the data. 2-furoylglycine and 5-hydroxymethyl-2-furoic acid - potential biomarkers for coffee consumption were identified at higher concentrations in coffee drinkers. Thus H-1 NMR urine metabolomics is applicable in the characterization of acute metabolic fingerprints from meal consumption and in the identification of metabolites that may serve as potential biomarkers.

The demand for chemometrics tools and concepts to study complex problems in modern biology and medicine has prompted chemometricians to shift their focus away from a traditional emphasis on model predictive capacity toward optimizing information exchange via model interpretation for biological validation. The interpretation of projection-based latent variable models is not straightforward because of its confounding of different systematic variations in the model components. Over the last 15 years, this has spurred the development of orthogonal-based methods that are capable of separating the correlated variation (to Y) from the noncorrelated (orthogonal to Y) variations in a single model. Here, we aim to provide a conceptual explanation of the advantages of orthogonal variation inspection in the context of Partial Least Squares (PLS) in multivariate classification and calibration. We propose that by inspecting the orthogonal variation, both model interpretation and information quality are improved by enhancement of the resulting level of knowledge. Although the predictive capacity of PLS using orthogonal methods may be identical to that of PLS alone, the combined result can be superior when it comes to the model interpretation. By discussing theory and examples, several new advantages revealed by inspection of orthogonal variation are highlighted.

We have developed a multistep strategy that integrates data from several large-scale experiments that suffer from systematic between-experiment variation. This strategy removes such variation that would otherwise mask differences of interest. It was applied to the evaluation of wood chemical analysis of 736 hybrid aspen trees: wild-type controls and transgenic trees potentially involved in wood formation. The trees were grown in four different greenhouse experiments imposing significant variation between experiments. Pyrolysis coupled to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS) was used as a high throughput-screening platform for fingerprinting of wood chemotype. Our proposed strategy includes quality control, outlier detection, gene specific classification, and consensus analysis. The orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) method was used to generate the consensus chemotype profiles for each transgenic line. These were thereafter compiled to generate a global dataset. Multivariate analysis and cluster analysis techniques revealed a drastic reduction in between-experiment variation that enabled a global analysis of all transgenic lines from the four independent experiments. Information from in-depth analysis of specific transgenic lines and independent peak identification validated our proposed strategy.

A modification of the ANOVA-PCA method, proposed by Harrington et al. to identify significant factors and interactions in an experimental design, is presented in this article. The modified method uses the idea of multiple table analysis, and looks for the common dimensions underlying the different data tables, or data blocks, generated by the "ANOVA-step" of the ANOVA-PCA method, in order to identify the significant factors. In this paper, the "Common Component and Specific Weights Analysis" method is used to analyse the calculated multi-block data set. This new method, called AComDim, was compared to the standard ANOVA-PCA method, by analysing four real data sets. Parameters computed during the AComDim procedure enable the computation of F-values to check whether the variability of each original data block is significantly greater than that of the noise.