Metabolic disparity between Cord serum and amniotic fluid revealed by 1H NMR based metabolomics approach

During pregnancy, a developing fetus (within amniotic sac and connected to the placenta through umbilical cord) is surrounded by a viscous yellowish amniotic fluid. After delivery, umbilical cord blood is collected as it contains stem cells which can be used as intervention of major hematopoietic or genetic disorders. The amniotic fluid is also used to diagnose the genetic disorders in developing fetus which may also have impact on the metabolic profiles of amniotic fluid. The present study has been designed to identify and quantify the concentration profiles of metabolites present in the cord blood and amniotic fluid. For this, 21 samples of cord blood serum and amniotic fluid were collected in pair and metabolic profiles were measured using 1D 1H CPMG NMR spectroscopy and compared using multivariate statistical analysis tools. The analytical variations have been minimized using formate as an internal reference and its concentration was set to 0.01 mM (nearly close to the detection limit of the 800 MHz NMR spectrometer).