Fuel stores and time of day account for variation in serum metabolomes of passerine migrants stopping over

Migratory birds excel in phenotypic flexibility, adapting physiologically as their life histories and environments require. Discerning the metabolic processes underlying migrants’ physiology, an emergent property of multiple continuous and dynamic organism-environment interactions, is therefore challenging, particularly under natural conditions. Accordingly, analyses of snapshot-sampled serum-circulating metabolites, versatile and readily applicable for migrating birds, have increasingly become the method of choice for such physiologic inference. However, the atemporal nature of single sampling might obscure the links between observed metabolite concentrations and the processes producing them, necessitating an analytical decoupling of focal processes from their broader biochemical background. In the present study, we examined how variation in combined fat and muscle fuel stores, traits pivotal in migratory context, relates to the serum-circulating metabolomes of spring-migrating Eurasia..., , , # Data from: Fuel stores and time of day account for variation in serum metabolomes of passerine migrants stopping over

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ncjsxkt4r](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ncjsxkt4r)

The data used in the analyses is presented in the four \"csv\" files: \"Zimin et al. 2024 Fuel stores metabolomics data - All lipophilic compounds\", \"Zimin et al. 2024 Fuel stores metabolomics data - All polar compounds\", \"Zimin et al. 2024 Fuel stores metabolomics data - Annotated lipophilic compounds\", and \"Zimin et al. 2024 Fuel stores metabolomics data - Annotated polar compounds\".

The first two files (\"all compounds\") are organized by analytes and metabolites detected via Compound Discoverer software (ver. 3.3; Thermo Fisher Scientific).

The columns signify the library-based annotation of each analyte (\"Name\"), its Mass-to-Charge ratio (\"m/z\"), and its retention time in minutes (\"RT [min]\"). The rest of the columns represent peak areas (analyte or metabolite abundances) of each ana...