An important component of ionizing radiation (IR) exposure after a radiological incident may include low-dose rate (LDR) exposures either externally or internally, such as from 137Cs deposition. In this study, a novel irradiation system, VAriable Dose-rate External 137Cs irradiatoR (VADER), was used to expose male and female mice to a variable LDR irradiation over a 30 d time span to simulate fall-out-type exposures in addition to biofluid collection from a reference dose rate (0.8 Gy/min). Radiation markers were identified by untargeted metabolomics and random forests. Mice exposed to LDR exposures were successfully identified from control groups based on their urine and serum metabolite profiles. In addition to metabolites commonly perturbed after IR exposure, we identified and validated a novel metabolite (hexosamine-valine-isoleucine-OH) that increased up to 150-fold after LDR and 80-fold after conventional exposures in urine. A multiplex panel consisting of hexosamine-valine-isoleucine-OH with other urinary metabolites (N6,N6,N6-trimethyllysine, carnitine, 1-methylnicotinamide, and α-ketoglutaric acid) achieved robust classification performance using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, irrespective of the dose rate or sex. These results show that in terms of biodosimetry, dysregulated energy metabolism is associated with IR exposure for both LDR and conventional IR exposures. These mass spectrometry data have been deposited to the NIH data repository via Metabolomics Workbench with study IDs ST001790, ST001791, ST001792, ST001793, and ST001806.
Keywords: biodosimetry; hexosamine−valine−isoleucine−OH; ionizing radiation; liquid chromatography; low-dose rate; mass spectrometry; metabolomics.