Exploratory metabolomics study of the experimental opisthorchiasis in a laboratory animal model (golden hamster,Mesocricetus auratus)

Background: opisthorchiasis is a parasitic infection caused by the liver flukes of the opisthorchiidae family. both experimental and epidemiological data strongly support a role of these parasites in the etiology of the hepatobiliary pathologies and an increased risk of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma. understanding a functional link between the infection and hepatobiliary pathologies requires a detailed description a host-parasite interaction on different levels of biological regulation including the metabolic response on the infection. the last one,however,remains practically undocumented. here we are describing a host response on opisthorchiidae infection using a metabolomics approach and present the first exploratory metabolomics study of an experimental model of o. felineus infection. methodology and principal findings: we conducted a nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr) based longitudinal metabolomics study involving a cohort of 30 animals with two degrees of infection and a control group. an exploratory analysis shows that the most noticeable trend (30% of total variance) in the data was related to the gender differences. therefore further analysis was done of each gender group separately applying a multivariate extension of the anova—asca (anova simultaneous component analysis). we show that in the males the infection specific time trends are present in the main component (43.5% variance),while in the females it is presented only in the second component and covers 24% of the variance. we have selected and annotated 24 metabolites associated with the observed effects and provided a physiological interpretation of the findings. conclusions: the first exploratory metabolomics study an experimental model of o. felineus infection is presented. our data show that at early stage of infection a response of an organism unfolds in a gender specific manner. also main physiological mechanisms affected appear rather nonspecific (a status of the metabolic stress) the data provides a set of the hypothesis for a search of the more specific metabolic markers of the opisthorchiidae infection. © 2017 kokova et al.