Metabolomics Analysis of the Responses to Partial Hepatectomy in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients

In this study, liquid chromatography/quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometry (LC/QTOFMS) was em-ployed for investigating the metabolome of the sera collected from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients before and 3 to 5 months after partial hepatectomy. To investigate the changes in metabolic phenotypes after the hepatic resection, principal components analysis (PCA) and support vector machine (SVM) were per-formed for the data grouping and classification. Based on the obtained SVM model, mass spectrometry spec-tra, database searching as well as the confirmation from authentic standards, several differentiating metabo-lites were tentatively identified. To improve visualization, z-score plot and heat map display were performed, which exhibited the changes in concentration of the metabolites. As a result, depletion of circulating car-nitine, reduced amino acid biosynthesis and increased rate of lipid peroxidation were observed. Meanwhile, up-regulation of hypoxanthine indicated that purine metabolism might serve as the salvage pathway. Collec-tively, the results reflected metabolic responses to surgical operation in HCC patients, suggesting perturba-tion of energy metabolism may occur in 3 to 5 months after the partial hepatectomy