Plasma Metabolomic and Lipidomic Alterations Associated with COVID-19

Wu, Di; Shu, Ting; Yang, Xiaobo; Song, Jian-Xin; Zhang, Mingliang; Yao, Chengye; Liu, Wen; Huang, Muhan; Yu, Yuan; Yang, Qingyu; Zhu, Tingju; Xu, Jiqian; Mu, Jingfang; Wang, Yaxin; Wang, Hong; Tang, Tang; Ren, Yujie; Wu, Yongran; Lin, Shu-Hai; Qiu, Yang; Zhang, Ding-Yu; Shang, You; Zhou, Xi

The pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global public health crisis. The symptoms of COVID-19 range from mild to severe conditions. However, the physiological changes associated with COVID-19 are barely understood. In this study, we performed targeted metabolomic and lipidomic analyses of plasma from a cohort of COVID-19 patients who had experienced different symptoms. We found the metabolite and lipid alterations exhibit apparent correlation with the course of disease in these COVID-19 patients, indicating that the development of COVID-19 affected whole-body metabolism of the patients. In particular, malic acid of the TCA cycle and carbamoyl phosphate of urea cycle reveal the altered energy metabolism and hepatic dysfunction, respectively. It should be noted that carbamoyl phosphate is profoundly down-regulated in fatal patients compared with mild patients. And more importantly, guanosine monophosphate (GMP), which is mediated by not only GMP synthase but also CD39 and CD73, is significantly changed between healthy subjects and COVID-19 patients, as well as between the mild and fatal groups. In addition, the dyslipidaemia was observed in COVID-19 patients. Overall, the disturbed metabolic patterns have been found to align with the progress and severity of COVID-19. This work provides valuable knowledge about plasma biomarkers associated with COVID-19 and potential therapeutic targets, as well as important resource for further studies of COVID-19 pathogenesis.