High altitude hypoxia stress is the key cause of high-altitude pulmonary edema and spleen contraction. The molecular mechanism of immune response of various tissue systems to hypoxia stress remains lacking. In this study, we applied proteomics combined with metabolomics to explore the key molecular profilings involved in high altitude hypoxia response in the spleen of mice. The results showed that 166 proteins were significantly up-regulated, and only 39 proteins were down-regulated. Bioinformatics analysis showed that mineral absorption, neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction, arachidonic acid metabolism, IL-17 signaling pathway and NOD-like preceptor signaling pathway were significantly enriched in the list of 166 upregulated differentially expressed proteins (DEPs). Among these metabolic pathways, the former three pathways were co-identified in KEGG terms from LC-MS/MS based metabolic analysis. We further found that both arachidonate 15-lipoxygenase and hematopoietic prostaglandin D synthase were upregulated by around 30% and 80% for their protein levels and mRNA levels, respectively. Most downstream metabolites were upregulated accordingly, such as prostaglandin A2 and D2. This study provides important evidence that arachidonic acid metabolism potentially promotes spleen hypoxia response through a combined analysis of proteomics and metabolism, which could bring new insights for the spleen targeted rational design upon arachidonic acid metabolism of new therapies.
Keywords: arachidonic acid; immune response; metabolism; proteomics; spleen.