Impact of a long-term high-fructose diet on systemic metabolic profiles of mice

Evidence is mounting that chronic high-fructose diets (HFrD) can lead to metabolic abnormalities and cause a variety of diseases. However, the underlying mechanism by which long-term high fructose intake influencing systemic metabolism remains unclarified. This study, therefore, attempted to investigate the impact of a high-fructose diet on metabolic profile. Four-week-old male C57BL/6 mice were fed with 15% fructose solution as their only source of water for 8 weeks. Afterward, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) was employed to investigate the comprehensive metabolic profile of serum, muscle, liver, heart, white adipose, brain, and kidney tissues, and multivariate analyses including principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least squared-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) were applied to screen for differential metabolite expression between the HFrD and control groups. Furthermore, the MetaboAnalyst 5.0 (http://www.metaboanalyst.ca) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes database (KEGG; http://www.kegg.jp) were employed to portray a detailed metabolic network. This study identified 62 metabolites related to HFrD and 10 disturbed metabolic pathways. The results indicated that high fructose intake mainly influenced amino acid metabolism and biosynthesis (glycine, serine, and threonine metabolism; aspartate, and glutamate metabolism; phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan biosynthesis, and arginine biosynthesis pathways), glutathione metabolism, sphingolipid metabolism, and glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism in serum, whereas these pathways were suppressed in the brain. Starch and sucrose metabolism in muscle was also disrupted. These results elucidate the effects of long-term high fructose consumption on the metabolic profiles of various tissues and provide new insight for the identification of potential metabolic biomarkers and pathways disrupted by high fructose.