Investigation of the Plasma Metabolic and Lipidomic Characteristics of a Chinese Population and Its Application in Biomarker Discovery for Renal Cell Carcinoma

Plasma metabolomics and lipidomics have been commonly used for biomarker discovery for the rich metabolic information they provide. Studies in white and Japanese populations suggested that gender and age can affect circulating plasma metabolite profiles; however, the Chinese population has not been surveyed. In our study, we profiled Chinese plasma metabolome and lipidome in a cohort of 534 healthy adults and reported an overview of metabolic characteristics in the Chinese population. Inter-individual analysis showed that inter-individual variations of the plasma metabolome and lipidome were 0.645 and 0.568, respectively. Further differential analysis indicated that gender and age would affect the metabolic status. Metabolic pathways such as fatty-acid metabolism, nicotinate and nicotinamide metabolism, steroidogenesis process and tryptophan metabolism were found to vary with gender and age. Comparison of metabolism characteristics between Chinese and other western population suggested that plasma metabolomics could reflect regional and ethnic differences, to some extent. Further, using the above strategy, renal cell carcinoma (RCC) biomarkers were explored based on age- and gender-matched healthy subjects, 34 patients with benign kidney lesions and 143 patients with RCC. Metabolic and lipid profiling of the plasma could significantly differentiate cancer cases from healthy controls and benign controls, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.971 and 0.839, respectively. Our study provides an overview of plasma metabolic characteristics in a Chinese population and suggests that plasma metabolomics and lipidomics are useful strategies for biomarker discovery. Funding Statement: This work was supported by National Basic Research Program of China (Nos. 2013CB530805 and 2014CBA02005), Major collaborative innovation projects (No. 2017-I2M-1-009), Key Basic Research Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (No. 2013FY114100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30970650, 31200614, 31400669, 81371515 and 81670611), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. 5132028), Basic scientific research (2017PT310004) and Biologic Medicine Information Center, National Scientific Data Sharing Platform for Population and Health. Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interests. Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.