Sofia Moco

Although the prevalence of main idiopathic forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has risen considerably over the last decades, their clinical features do not allow accurate prediction of prognosis, likelihood of disease progression, or response to specific therapy. Through a better understanding of the molecular pathways involved in IBD and the promise of more targeted therapies, the personalized approach to the management of IBD shows potential. To achieve this, there remains a significant need to better understand the disease process at cellular and molecular levels for any given individual with IBD. The complexity of biological functional networks behind the etiology of IBD highlights the need for their comprehensive analysis. In this, omics technologies can generate a systemic view of IBD pathogenesis on which to base novel, multiple pathway-integrated therapies. Omics sciences have just started to contribute here by generating gene, protein expression, metabolite data at gl...

neo-Clerodane diterpenes of plant origin are molecules difficult to monitor due to their nonspecific UV/vis absorption. The present work describes for the first time the application of the LC-MS-SPE-NMR technique for the isolation and characterization of three new neo-clerodane diterpenes, 3beta-hydroxyteucroxylepin and teuluteumin A and teuluteumin B, from Teucrium luteum subsp. flavovirens, harvested from two different locations.

Increasing evidence points toward the critical and long-term involvement of prenatal and early nutrition and lifestyle on later health and disease risk predisposition. Metabolomics is now a well-established top-down systems biology approach that explores the genetic-environment-health paradigm. The generalization of such approaches has opened new research areas to deepen our current understanding of many physiological processes, as well as foods and nutrient functionalities in target populations. It is envisioned that this will provide new avenues toward preventive medicine and prognostic strategies for tailored therapeutic and personalized nutrition management. The development of systems biology approaches and the new generation of biomarker patterns will provide the opportunity to associate complex metabolic regulations with the etiology of multifactorial pediatric diseases. This may subsequently lead to the development of system mechanistic hypotheses that could be targeted with new nutritional personalized concepts. Therefore, this review aims to describe recent applications of metabolomics in preclinical and clinical fields with insights into disease diagnostics/monitoring and improvement of homeostasis metabolic regulation that may be translatable to novel therapeutic and nutrition advances in pediatric research.

Metabolism is essential to understand human health. To characterize human metabolism, a high-resolution read-out of the metabolic status under various physiological conditions, either in health or disease, is needed. Metabolomics offers an unprecedented approach for generating system-specific biochemical definitions of a human phenotype through the capture of a variety of metabolites in a single measurement. The emergence of large cohorts in clinical studies increases the demand of technologies able to analyze a large number of measurements, in an automated fashion, in the most robust way. NMR is an established metabolomics tool for obtaining metabolic phenotypes. Here, we describe the analysis of NMR-based urinary profiles for metabolic studies, challenged to a large human study (3007 samples). This method includes the acquisition of nuclear Overhauser effect spectroscopy one-dimensional and J-resolved two-dimensional (J-Res-2D) (1)H NMR spectra obtained on a 600 MHz spectrometer, equipped with a 120 μL flow probe, coupled to a flow-injection analysis system, in full automation under the control of a sampler manager. Samples were acquired at a throughput of ~20 (or 40 when J-Res-2D is included) min/sample. The associated technical analysis error over the full series of analysis is 12%, which demonstrates the robustness of the method. With the aim to describe an overall metabolomics workflow, the quantification of 36 metabolites, mainly related to central carbon metabolism and gut microbial host cometabolism, was obtained, as well as multivariate data analysis of the full spectral profiles. The metabolic read-outs generated using our analytical workflow can therefore be considered for further pathway modeling and/or biological interpretation.