Metabolic profiling reveals disorder of amino acid metabolism in various brain regions from a rat model of chronic unpredictable mild stress

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Wei Jia, Professor and Co-Director of the UNCG Center for Research Excellence in Bioactive Food Components (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: Chronic stress is closely linked to clinical depression, which could be assessed by a chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) animal model. We present here a GC/MS-based metabolic profiling approach to investigate neurochemical changes in the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, and remaining brain tissues. Multi-criteria assessment for multivariate statistics could identify differential metabolites between the CUMS-model rats versus the healthy controls. This study demonstrates that the significantly perturbed metabolites mainly involving amino acids play an indispensable role in regulating neural activity in the brain. Therefore, results obtained from such metabolic profiling strategy potentially provide a unique perspective on molecular mechanisms of chronic stress.

Additional Information

Publication
FEBS Letters. 582 (17): 2627-2636
Language: English
Date: 2008
Keywords
Chronic unpredictable mild stress, Metabolic profiling, GC/MS, Multivariate statistics, Amino acids

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