Metabolic Changes in Flatfish Hepatic Tumours Revealed by NMR-Based Metabolomics and Metabolic Correlation Networks

Histopathologically well-characterized fish liver was analyzed by 800 MHz 1H NMR metabolomics to identify metabolic changes between healthy and tumor tissue. Data were analyzed by multivariate statistics and metabolic correlation networks, and results revealed elevated anaerobic metabolism and reduced choline metabolism in tumor tissue. Significant negative correlations were observed between alanine-acetate (p = 3.0 × 10−5) and between proline-acetate (p = 0.003) in tumors only, suggesting alanine and proline are utilized as alternative energy sources in flatfish liver tumors.