Metabolomics articles from across Nature Portfolio

The mechanism by which metformin affects food intake remains controversial. Now, two studies link metformin treatment with the induction of the appetite-suppressing metabolite N-lactoyl-phenylalanine, which is produced by the intestine.

The authors develop a metabolic engineering strategy for improving polyketide production of industrial interest and discovering new natural products in bacteria.

Papillary thyroid cancers (PTC) generally have good prognosis, but their recurrence rate remains high. Here, the authors use proteogenomics and metabolomics to identify molecular features in PTC tumours and determine PTC subtypes that are associated with prognosis and potential targeted therapies.

Aging dynamics of complex lipids are incompletely understood. Here Janssens and colleagues describe lipids that change with age across ten tissues in mice. Notably, bis(monoacylglycerol)phosphate accumulated with age. This lipid also accumulated in muscle of older humans, and reduced upon a short bout of exercise.

Glucocorticoids reprogram the mitochondrial metabolism of macrophages, resulting in increased and sustained production of the anti-inflammatory metabolite itaconate and, as a consequence, inhibition of the inflammatory response.

Here, the authors employ multi-omics on a cohort comprising three generations of family members, showing that fecal microbiota populations, functions, and metabolome of infants vary greatly from their maternal lineage, exhibiting a less diverse microbiota and differences in various metabolite classes including short- and branched-chain fatty acids.

The mechanism by which metformin affects food intake remains controversial. Now, two studies link metformin treatment with the induction of the appetite-suppressing metabolite N-lactoyl-phenylalanine, which is produced by the intestine.

The Periodic Table of Food Initiative addresses food biomolecular composition information gaps through a standardized, accessible and enabling platform based on analytical tools, data and capacity building. Data from 1,650 foods serve as starting point for demonstrating the capacity of this initiative to contribute to nutrition, health and food systems transformations.

The rate of ATP production and the total mass of enzymes were quantified for both glycolysis and mitochondrial respiration to determine the proteome efficiency of these pathways. Per unit of enzyme mass, mitochondrial respiration generates energy faster than glycolysis and is thus more proteome efficient. Despite being less proteome efficient, constitutive glycolysis comes with the benefit of rendering cells robust to hypoxia.

The microbiome is implicated in a study that involves the metabolism of dietary fibre into short-chain fatty acids, which provides a biochemical link to the poorly understood histone butyrylation.

Glycerol-3-Phosphate (G3P) and phosphoethanolamine (pEtN) biosynthetic pathways are modulated during senescence establishment to sustain lipid droplet accumulation and senescence-associated secretome. These findings reveal new targets for an immunomodulatory approach against senescent cells.