A serum metabolomics study of gastric cancer based on pseudotargeted liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry approach

Abstract

Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignant and the second most frequent cause of cancer-related mortality in the world. Noninvasive screen methods including tumor markers are intensively needed in the clinic. To discover metabolic markers for gastric cancers, the sera metabolic profiles of 20 gastric cancer (GC) patients and 40 healthy controls were analyzed by liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) using a pseudotargeted approach. The results of principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) indicated that obvious classification could be observed between GC and the healthy controls. According to the results of non-parametric statistical test, 57 ions were identified among all the differential metabolic features. Of all the identified differential metabolites, dihydrocholesterol provide good diagnostic performance of GC, which was also validated by another cohort including the 20 gastric cancer patients and the 39 healthy controls. With this robust pseudotargeted approach, our study provides both potential tumor markers and the basis for the metabolic phenotype of gastric cancers.