Fish Skin and Gill Mucus: A Source of Metabolites for Non-Invasive Health Monitoring and Research.

Lada Ivanova,Mona C Gjessing,Haitham Tartor,Oscar D Rangel-Huerta,Maria K Dahle,Silvio Uhlig

doi:10.3390/metabo12010028

Lada Ivanova, Mona C Gjessing + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/metabo12010028

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Journal: Metabolites	Publication Date: Dec 31, 2021
Citations: 9	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Norwegian Veterinary Institute

Abstract

Mucous membranes such as the gill and skin mucosa in fish protect them against a multitude of environmental factors. At the same time, changes in the molecular composition of mucus may provide valuable information about the interaction of the fish with their environment, as well as their health and welfare. In this study, the metabolite profiles of the plasma, skin and gill mucus of freshwater Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) were compared using liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS). Several normalization procedures aimed to reduce unwanted variation in the untargeted data were tested. In addition, the basal metabolism of skin and gills, and the impact of the anesthetic benzocaine for euthanisation were studied. For targeted metabolomics, the commercial AbsoluteIDQ p400 HR kit was used to evaluate the potential differences in metabolic composition in epidermal mucus as compared to the plasma. The targeted metabolomics data showed a high level of correlation between different types of biological fluids from the same individual, indicating that mucus metabolite composition could be used for fish health monitoring and research.

Highlights

In order to obtain and maintain high standards in aquaculture, and to reduce mortality, non- or low-invasive methods to monitor fish health are required [1]
Systems coupled with liquid chromatography (LC) or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), metabolomics has been successfully used to explore suitable biomarkers for specific conditions, and to identify the particular metabolic pathways that are involved in e.g., disease mechanisms or exposures with certain chemicals [3]
Considering that the data normalization is a known challenge in metabolomics approaches, several normalization strategies were tested in order to reduce within-class variability attributed to the variable dilution status of individual mucus samples

Summary

Introduction

In order to obtain and maintain high standards in aquaculture, and to reduce mortality, non- or low-invasive methods to monitor fish health are required [1]. Systems coupled with liquid chromatography (LC) or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), metabolomics has been successfully used to explore suitable biomarkers for specific conditions, and to identify the particular metabolic pathways that are involved in e.g., disease mechanisms or exposures with certain chemicals [3]. As a result of the increasing focus on animal welfare, the interest in monitoring health biomarkers, e.g., for disease prediction or treatments effects in samples obtained by non-invasive strategies is growing [2]. Blood testing has become one of the most informative screening methods in metabolomics, there is a trend towards using even less invasive samples, like mucus [1]. Several issues attributed to the sampling of mucus have a strong influence on the validity of metabolomics data [2,7]

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