Metabolomics profiling for identification of potential biomarkers in chickens infected with avian leukosis virus subgroup J (ALV-J)
Introduction
Avian leukosis virus (ALV) is one of the major causes of disease in poultry. The subgroup J of ALV (ALV-J) is primarily associated with myeloid leukosis (ML) in broiler breeders (Payne and Nair, 2012) and has a higher pathogenicity and transmission ability than the other ALV subgroups. To date, no vaccines or effective drugs have been developed for preventing the diseases caused by ALV-J. Eradication by removal of infected groups is an effective approach to minimize the transmission of ALV-J from hens to their progeny in the developed poultry industry; however, the control and eradication of ALV-J remain a major challenge for those poultry industries that are less organized and house local breeds of chickens (Lin et al., 2016; Lin et al., 2017; Meng et al., 2018) and backyard and hobby chickens (Smith et al., 2018). Hence, it is imperative to find potential biomarkers for providing a novel perspective in the prevention and treatment of ALV-J-induced diseases.
Metabolomics is the comprehensive study of metabolites in a defined biological sample such as tissue or bodily fluid, for example, blood (Dunn et al., 2011). It is now widely used for searching new disease biomarkers, and it is a powerful tool in clinical diagnosis and prediction of therapeutic effects (Tolstikov, 2016; Rabinowitz et al., 2011) because of its high-throughput quantification of metabolites. The increase or decrease in the levels of certain metabolites in a tissue is closely linked with pathologic processes; hence, by using metabolomic profiling, potential biomarkers for the diagnosis or therapy of some diseases have been identified (Zhang et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2019; Lindahl et al., 2017; Sun et al., 2014; Beachler et al., 2020). However, to the best of our knowledge, no metabolomics studies have been conducted in chickens infected with ALV-J.
Among the analytical tools for metabolomics, liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is the most popular tool as it not only enables to detect low concentrations of metabolites but also allows to collect both quantitative and structural information (Theodoridis et al., 2012). In the present study, we performed LC-MS-based metabolomics on plasma samples to compare the metabolic profiles of ALV-J-infected chickens and healthy controls. Our aim was to detect the metabolites whose levels were altered in the ALV-J infected chickens and to discover the potential biomarker and key pathways in ALV-J-infected chickens.
Section snippets
Sample collection
All experimental animals were treated according to the International Guiding Principles for Biomedical Research Involving Animals (Demers et al., 2006). The study was approved by the Committee on Biomedical Ethics of Huizhou University. Female Huiyang bearded chickens of approximately 25 weeks of age and with an average body weight of 1312.70 ± 104.25 g were obtained from Bo Luo He Sheng Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Co., Ltd. (Huizhou, China) and used in this study. The chickens belonged to
Plasma metabolic profiling based on UPLC-Q-TOF/MS analysis
We acquired metabolic profiles of 38 plasma samples by UPLC-Q-TOF/MS analysis in both positive and negative ion modes. A total of 9076 ion features in the positive ion mode and 5657 ion features in the negative ion mode were matched in QC and actual samples. After filtering out ions with RSD > 30% in all QC samples, 80.78% of the ions with characteristic features in the positive ion mode and 77.8% of the ions in the negative mode had RSD < 30%. These data indicated a good reproducibility of the
Discussion
Omics is the study of the entire biomolecules present in living organisms and includes proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. Studies on the transcriptome or proteome of cells infected with avian leucosis provide valuable data on changes in gene expression, which would be helpful to examine their potential for pathogenicity caused by ALV-J (Payne and Nair, 2012). Metabolomics is the analysis of the complete set of metabolites, or metabolome, in an organism (Griffin and Shockcor, 2004;
Conclusion
In the present study, on the basis of LC-MS-based metabolomics analysis on plasma samples, 68 plasma metabolites related to ALV-J infection were identified; of these, 50 metabolites showed a remarkable increase in their levels, while 18 metabolites showed significantly reduced levels. The metabolites were primarily related to terpenoid backbone biosynthesis, pentose and glucuronate interconversions, metabolic pathways, biosynthesis of amino acids, and amino sugar and nucleotide sugar metabolism.
Competing interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Funding
This research was funded by the Educational Commission of Guangdong Province, China [grant number: 2018KTSCX217]; the Science and Technology Planning Project of HuiZhou City, China [grant number: 2019X0701012]; and the International Training Project for Outstanding Young Scientific Research Talents in Guangdong Universities. All funders participated in designing the study; collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data; and writing the manuscript. Key research and cultivation projects of Huizhou
Authors' contributions
Conceptualization, Funding acquisition,Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Data curation and Supervision, H.L.; Investigation, Formal analysis and Methodology, Y.C.; Validation and Methodology, FC and YL. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Acknowledgments
We thank manager Baoan Mai at Bo Luo He Sheng Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Co., Ltd. (Huizhou, China) for help in the collection of chicken blood. We thank International Science Editing (http://www.international science editing.com) for editing this manuscript.
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