Multiomics characterization of cell type repertoires for urine liquid biopsies

Abstract

Urine is assayed alongside blood in medicine, yet current clinical diagnostic tests utilize only a small fraction of its total biomolecular repertoire, potentially foregoing high-resolution insights into human health and disease. In this work, we characterized the joint landscapes of transcriptomic and metabolomic signals in human urine. We also compared the urine transcriptome to plasma cell-free RNA, identifying a distinct cell type repertoire and enrichment for metabolic signal. Untargeted metabolomic measurements identified a complementary set of pathways to the transcriptomic analysis. Our findings suggest that urine is a promising biofluid yielding prognostic and detailed insights for hard-to-biopsy tissues with low representation in the blood, offering promise for a new generation of liquid biopsies.