Oxidized glycerophosphatidylcholines in diabetes through non-targeted metabolomics: Their annotation and biological meaning.

Lipid oxidation is one of the most important processes occurring in living cells and has been investigated through stable end-products. Currently, new insights into many physiological and pathophysiological processes provide a measurement of the first products of oxidation, e.g., oxidized glycerophosphatidylcholines (oxGPCs). Here, we evaluate the capacity of untargeted global metabolomics to measure oxGPCs in serum samples. This evaluation covered analytical reproducibility and data quality as well as the ability to capture metabolic alterations in diverse conditions. The analytical evaluation was performed based on the quality control samples, while the comparative analysis was based on the model of the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The novelty of this approach arises not only from the measurement of oxGPCs instead of lipid peroxide-derived aldehydes but also from the stratification of the patients according to body mass index (BMI). Such a scenario was dictated by the fact that, despite the well-known relationship between obesity and T2DM development, there are lean individuals suffering from T2DM as well as obese people with normal glucose homeostasis. Our results provided evidence to support the ability of nontargeted metabolomics to measure oxGPCs. Comparative analysis of measured oxGPCs revealed differences in the level of oxGPCs either between different stages of disease development (insulin resistance, prediabetes) or BMI groups (normal weight, overweight, obese). The obtained results provided new insights into the metabolic processes leading to the development of T2DM and opened new paths in the investigation of the impact of body mass in T2DM progress.
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