Cooking and salting impacts on sea cucumber (Holothuria atra) metabolome and their entanglements on anticoagulant potential as revealed by UPLC-QqQ-MS/MS analysis and chemometrics

Sea cucumbers increasingly consumed as a premium part of traditional diet in Middle East provide viable reservoir of chemical entities with potential significance. The current work aims to monitor metabolome patterns of Holothuria atra following salting and cooking treatments and their entanglements on anticoagulant potential using UPLC-MS/MS combined with chemometrics. A total of 64 peaks encompassing fatty acids, phospholipids, triterpene glycosides, flavonoids, phenolic acids, carotenoids and phytosterols were chemically profiled. Given this analysis, fatty acids and carotenoids witnessed an obvious increasing trend in fresh and cooked sea cucumber samples. Cooked and salted samples relatively augmented phenolic acids, flavonoids and triterpene glycosides. OPLS-DA underscored clear discrimination among the comparable samples highlighting lysoPC 16:0, cucumariaxanthin B, astaxanthin and arachidonic acid as focal discriminators of fresh samples while pyrogallol, ellagic acid and kaempferol-O-rhamnoside were the determining metabolites of cooked samples. Successively, the differential markers enriched in salted ones included chlorogenic acid, holothurin B and betulinic acid. Experimentally speaking, the sea cucumber samples exerted noteworthy dose and time-dependent anti-clotting potential. OPLS derived coefficient plot portrayed that chlorogenic acid, β-tocotrienol, holothurin B and betulinic acid dramatically augmented during salting treatment synergistically mediated anticoagulant efficacy. These findings pursue concept of nutritional therapy to rectify thromboembolic disorders.