Metabolomics, the comprehensive study of metabolites, has merged as a potent tool for analyzing complex phenotypes and identifying biomarkers of specific physiological responses and has the potential to lead to innovative therapeutic and diagnostic schemes for many diseases. In a former report, we showed that taurine supplementation considerably ameliorated dyslipidemia in rats fed a high-caloric diet. In this work, we examined the metabolic changes that occur in rat serum after they were fed a normal diet, a high-fat diet, and a high-fat diet containing 2% taurine (tau) by NMR spectroscopy combined with a multivariate statistical analysis containing PCA, PLS-DA, and OPLS-DA. We obtained 1H-NMR spectra of rat serum and used pattern recognition to identify key metabolites related to taurine supplementation. We found significant changes in creatine, methionine, glutamine, and threonine as well as in lipids, all of which decreased in the Tau group. To use these changes in metabolites as novel therapeutic and diagnostic markers, it should first be investigated whether these results are reproducible in future experiments. Next, researchers should determine how these changes affect serum lipid changes. This study identified some changes in serum metabolites and demonstrated the possibility of using an NMR-based metabolomics method to explore the effects of a taurine supplement on dyslipidemia in a high-fat-diet-induced rat model.
Keywords: Dyslipidemia; High-fat diet-induced rat model; Metabolomics; NMR spectroscopy.