Abstract
Environmental metabolomics has the potential to facilitate the establishment of a new suite of tools for assessing the physiological status of important wildlife species. A first step in developing such tools is to evaluate the impacts of various capture techniques on metabolic profiles as capture is necessary to obtain the biological samples required for assays. This study employed 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolite profiling of 562 blood serum samples from wild bighorn sheep to identify characteristic molecular serum makers of three capture techniques (dart, dropnet, and helicopter-based captures) to inform future sampling protocols for metabolomics studies, and to provide insights into the physiological impacts of capture. We found that different capture techniques induce distinct changes in amino acid serum profiles, the urea cycle, and glycolysis, and attribute the differences in metabolic patterns to differences in physical activity and stress caused by the different capture methods. These results suggest that when designing experiments involving the capture of wild animals, it may be prudent to employ a single capture technique to reduce confounding factors. Our results also supports administration of tranquilizers as soon as animals are restrained to mitigate short-term physiological and metabolic responses when using pursuit and physical restraint capture techniques.
Highlights
Environmental metabolomics has the potential to facilitate the establishment of a new suite of tools for assessing the physiological status of important wildlife species
The present study has explored the value of 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolite profiling to identify characteristic molecular makers resulting from the three primary techniques used to capture wild ruminants for research, conservation, and management
Partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) scores plots enabled the visualization of metabolic profile differences within groups of animals that were captured by the three different capture techniques (Fig. 2A), as well as between groups (Fig. 2B–D)
Summary
Environmental metabolomics has the potential to facilitate the establishment of a new suite of tools for assessing the physiological status of important wildlife species. We found that different capture techniques induce distinct changes in amino acid serum profiles, the urea cycle, and glycolysis, and attribute the differences in metabolic patterns to differences in physical activity and stress caused by the different capture methods These results suggest that when designing experiments involving the capture of wild animals, it may be prudent to employ a single capture technique to reduce confounding factors. A first step in developing metabolomics-based tools for assessing the health, nutritional, and physiological status of wild ruminants is to evaluate the impacts of various capture techniques on metabolic profiles as capture is a pre-requisite for obtaining the biological samples required for assays. This work characterized the serum profiles of polar metabolites of wild bighorn sheep captured with different techniques to inform future sampling protocols for metabolomics studies of wild ruminants, and to provide insights into the physiological impacts of capture. We have found that in addition to stress indicators, different capture techniques induce very distinct and broad-spectrum serum metabolic changes in these wild animals
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