Background: Understanding the metabolic and transcription basis of pumpkin seed oil (PSO) intervention on metabolic disease (MD) is essential to daily nutrition and health.
Results: This study analyzed the liver metabolic variations of Wistar rats fed normal diet (CON), high-fat diet (HFD) and high-fat plus PSO diet (PSO) to establish the relationship between the liver metabolite composition/transcript profile and the effects of PSO on MD. By using proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy together with multivariate data analysis, it was found that, compared with CON rats, HFD rats showed clear dysfunctions of choline metabolism, glucose metabolism and nucleotide and amino acid metabolism. Using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), it was found that, compared with HFD rats, PSO rats showed alleviated endoplasmic reticulum stress accompanied by lowered unfolded protein response.
Conclusion: These findings provide useful information to understand the metabolic alterations triggered by MD and to evaluate the effects of PSO intervention. © 2016 Society of Chemical Industry.
Keywords: metabolic disease (MD); metabonomics; pumpkin seed oil (PSO); transcript profile.
© 2016 Society of Chemical Industry.