A Plasma Metabolomic Investigation of Colorectal Cancer Patients by Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry

Due to hypoxic conditions, colorectal cancer (CRC) tissues have a specific metabolism compared with normal mucosa, and this study aimed to investigate blood plasma metabolite differences between CRC patients and healthy subjects. Non-targeted methods have previously been used to characterize CRC disease diagnosis and identify small molecules in biological samples, but here we used a metabolomic approach based on liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) of blood plasma from CRC patients (n=10) and healthy subjects (n=10). The analysis detected 130 identified compounds including free amino acids, fatty acids and nucleotides. Of these, many free amino acids were decreased in CRC patients while nucleotide-related and stress-related metabolites were increased in CRC patients compared with healthy subjects. Multivariate analysis clearly separated CRC patients and healthy subjects. These results demonstrate that plasma metabolite would reflects tumoral specific metabolism and metabolomic profiling of blood plasma using LC-MS is a valuable tool for characterizing CRC patients based on plasma metabolite diagnostic markers.