Insights gained into respiratory infection pathogenesis using lung tissue metabolomics
Jean Bernatchez, Laura‐Isobel McCall
Abstract
Respiratory infections have long represented a serious threat to humanity, given their relative ease of dissemination via aerosols. The current pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and recent outbreaks of related coronaviruses and influenza continue to highlight the importance of studying the pathogenesis of these diseases to better prepare ourselves for the next threat. Elucidating the metabolic determinants of severe versus mild disease states in the lung during respiratory infections may hold the key to the development of therapeutics to modulate symptom and disease severity. Metabolomics and the related field of lipidomics seek to analyze the global changes of small molecule effectors of gene expression and lipids in living systems, respectively. Two principal techniques are used to study these changes: mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The first technique utilizes the mass-to-charge ratio of molecular ions to help elucidate molecular structure, whereas the second technique utilizes the differences in local magnetic fields about the nuclei of atoms in a molecule to help determine the chemical structure In this Pearl, we review the advances in the fields of untargeted metabolomics and lipidomics as they pertain to the study of lung tissue, in respiratory infectious diseases. For in vitro or ex vivo immunometabolomic studies of respiratory pathogens or for targeted metabolomic analyses, we refer the reader to excellent reviews on these topics (e.g., Goodwin and colleagues [2], du Preez and colleagues [3], Rao and colleagues [4]).