Discover boy specific-biomarkers and reveal gender-related metabolic differences in central precocious puberty

Robust 1D selective correlation NMR spectroscopy for rapid chemical and biological applications

Selective homonuclear proton correlation NMR spectroscopy (COSY) provides a useful detection tool for elucidating molecular structures and identifying chemical compositions in 1D spectroscopic patterns. However, conventional 1D selective COSY experiments highly rely on the performance of selective excitation on targeted signals and their applications generally suffer from spectral congestion in complex chemical and biological samples. Herein, based on the concept of targeted excitation on coupled proton pairs and spectroscopic separation on their respective COSY responses, we propose a 1D selective NMR approach that is capable of individually recording direct coupling correlation information of targeted proton groups for analyses on complex samples, free of spectral congestion. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated on a medicine sample, a biological molecule, and a real metabonomics sample of human serum. This approach shows a promising analytical technique for structural studies and component analyses in chemical and biological applications. Keywords: NMR spectroscopy, Correlation spectroscopy, Targeted signal excitation, Spectral congestion, Molecular structure analysis.

Childhood Obesity, Hypothalamic Inflammation, and the Onset of Puberty: A Narrative Review

The onset of puberty, which is under the control of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, is influenced by various factors, including obesity, which has been associated with the earlier onset of puberty. Obesity-induced hypothalamic inflammation may cause premature activation of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons, resulting in the development of precocious or early puberty. Mechanisms involving phoenixin action and hypothalamic microglial cells are implicated. Furthermore, obesity induces structural and cellular brain alterations, disrupting metabolic regulation. Imaging studies reveal neuroinflammatory changes in obese individuals, impacting pubertal timing. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy enables the assessment of the brain's neurochemical composition by measuring key metabolites, highlighting potential pathways involved in neurological changes associated with obesity. In this article, we present evidence indicating a potential association among obesity, hypothalamic inflammation, and precocious puberty.

NMR and MS reveal characteristic metabolome atlas and optimize esophageal squamous cell carcinoma early detection

Metabolic changes precede malignant histology. However, it remains unclear whether detectable characteristic metabolome exists in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) tissues and biofluids for early diagnosis. Here, we conduct NMR- and MS-based metabolomics on 1,153 matched ESCC tissues, normal mucosae, pre- and one-week post-operative sera and urines from 560 participants across three hospitals, with machine learning and WGCNA. Aberrations in 'alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism' proved to be prevalent throughout the ESCC evolution, consistently identified by NMR and MS, and reflected in 16 serum and 10 urine metabolic signatures in both discovery and validation sets. NMR-based simplified panels of any five serum or urine metabolites outperform clinical serological tumor markers (AUC = 0.984 and 0.930, respectively), and are effective in distinguishing early-stage ESCC in test set (serum accuracy = 0.994, urine accuracy = 0.879). Collectively, NMR-based biofluid screening can reveal characteristic metabolic events of ESCC and be feasible for early detection (ChiCTR2300073613).