The metabolic profiling of exercise intervention: exercise metabolomics

In exercise intervention science, the nascent fields of exercise ‘omics’ (metabolomics and proteomics) encompass the identification, characterisation, and quantification of the changes over time for metabolite and protein content of whole cells, tissues, or body fluids. In order to establish the current status, a literature search was completed using a metasearch engine linked to academic database resources using a combination of the keywords; ‘exercise’, ‘sport’, ‘intervention’, ‘metabol*’ which resulted in 235 potential studies. The search was refined to relevance based on the following inclusion criteria: healthy human subjects; exercise/training intervention; analysis of targeted or untargeted metabolites in muscle, blood or urine; published between 1999-2011. Studies were excluded that concerned animal subjects, humans diagnosed with mechanical or medical problems, no exercise/training intervention, diet-based intervention or nutritional studies, reviews, abstracts without full-text available and duplicates. These inclusion/exclusion criteria were used to select relevant studies to extract and compare data on the change in metabolites induced by exercise intervention, and compare the analytical techniques used over the past 12years. The refined search resulted in a final selection of eighteen studies that were reviewed. Data on study design, populations, exercise intervention, outcome measures and analytical techniques, were compiled and analysed. Studies have been reported for targeted and nontargeted biological profiling of blood and urine, based mostly on gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Standardised protocols for sampling and analysis are at an early stage and few studies report chemometric analysis of the data. GC-MS and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry data for urine, plasma and saliva from baseline studies in our laboratory are presented. AL acknowledges a PhD scholarship from the School of Health, Sport and Bioscience, University of East London Where applicable, the authors confirm that the experiments described here conform with The Physiological Society ethical requirements.