Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Sep 17;11(9):635.
doi: 10.3390/metabo11090635.

Mass Spectrometry-Based Zebrafish Toxicometabolomics: A Review of Analytical and Data Quality Challenges

Katyeny Manuela da Silva  1 , Elias Iturrospe  1   2 , Chloe Bars  3 , Dries Knapen  4 , Steven Van Cruchten  3 , Adrian Covaci  1 , Alexander L N van Nuijs  1
Affiliations
Review

Mass Spectrometry-Based Zebrafish Toxicometabolomics: A Review of Analytical and Data Quality Challenges

Katyeny Manuela da Silva et al. Metabolites. .

Abstract

Metabolomics has achieved great progress over the last 20 years, and it is currently considered a mature research field. As a result, the number of applications in toxicology, biomarker, and drug discovery has also increased. Toxicometabolomics has emerged as a powerful strategy to provide complementary information to study molecular-level toxic effects, which can be combined with a wide range of toxicological assessments and models. The zebrafish model has gained importance in recent decades as a bridging tool between in vitro assays and mammalian in vivo studies in the field of toxicology. Furthermore, as this vertebrate model is a low-cost system and features highly conserved metabolic pathways found in humans and mammalian models, it is a promising tool for toxicometabolomics. This short review aims to introduce zebrafish researchers interested in understanding the effects of chemical exposure using metabolomics to the challenges and possibilities of the field, with a special focus on toxicometabolomics-based mass spectrometry. The overall goal is to provide insights into analytical strategies to generate and identify high-quality metabolomic experiments focusing on quality management systems (QMS) and the importance of data reporting and sharing.

Keywords: analytical chemistry; mass spectrometry; metabolomics; quality assurance and quality control; zebrafish.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest relative to the work presented in this manuscript. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors. The European Union cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained in this paper. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute endorsement or recommendation for use.

Figures

Figure 2
Figure 2
Overview of confidence levels in compound annotation using different scales. The figure was adapted from [125,126,127,128] and more detailed information about the mentioned confidence levels can be found in [124,125,126,127,128,129,131].
Figure 1
Figure 1
Quality management system strategies in the zebrafish metabolomics workflow.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Parasuraman S. Toxicological screening. J. Pharmacol. Pharmacother. 2011;2:74. doi: 10.4103/0976-500X.81895. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Garcia G.R., Noyes P.D., Tanguay R.L. Advancements in zebrafish applications for 21st century toxicology. Pharmacol. Ther. 2016;161:11–21. doi: 10.1016/j.pharmthera.2016.03.009. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Dix D.J., Houck K.A., Martin M.T., Richard A.M., Setzer R.W., Kavlock R.J. The ToxCast Program for Prioritizing Toxicity Testing of Environmental Chemicals. Toxicol. Sci. 2007;95:5–12. doi: 10.1093/toxsci/kfl103. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bambino K., Chu J. Current Topics in Developmental Biology. Volume 124. Academic Press Inc.; Amsterdam, The Netherlands: 2017. Zebrafish in Toxicology and Environmental Health; pp. 331–367. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Lai K.P., Gong Z., Tse W.K.F. Zebrafish as the toxicant screening model: Transgenic and omics approaches. Aquat. Toxicol. 2021;234:105813. doi: 10.1016/j.aquatox.2021.105813. - DOI - PubMed