Effects Of Heavy Ion Radiation On Rat Frontal Cortex And Microgravity On Rat Immune Tissues Studied By NMR-Based Metabonomics Data Analysis

Space radiation, especially heavy-ion radiation can cause the damage of DNA, the death of cell, as well as the incidence of some cancers, which is a difficult problem need to be overcome in the process of human deep space exploration. Microgravity combined with other space environmental factors will lead to the dysfunction of cardiovascular system, the disorders of nervous system, decrease in immune function, bone salt loss, muscle atrophy, space motion sickness, endocrine disorders and a series of physiological responses. However, the mechanisum is not clear until now. Rats heads were exposed to 12C6+ particle beam to simulate the biological effects of space heavy ions radiation on the central nervous system (CNS).1H NMR-based metabonomics method is used to detect and analyze the metabolites in frontal cortex of rats exposed to radiation. Combined with statistical analysis and t-test, a number of neurochemicals including some key neurotransmitters were identified to have changed significantly in abundance. These marker metabolites were as follow: taurine, lactate, creatinine, glutamate,4-aminobutyric acid, myo-inositol, and phosphorylcholine. Combining the results of differential proteomics analysis, the metabolites including GABA, glutamate, lactate, and taurine participated in key biological pathways such as neurotransmitter synthesis pathway and signaling pathways of neurotransmitter receptor-mediated may be impacted from heavy ion radiation. All these findings will provide favorable information to further clarify the molecular mechanism of heavy ion radiation effects, so as to provide foundation for developing effective countermeasures to heavy ions radiation from biological ways. The rat tail suspension model was taken to simulate the microgravity effect on the immune system. The immune organs were extracted and studied by metabonomics analysis based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and pattern recognition (PR) techniques. Finally, we found that the metabolites varied obviously in TS spleen as compared to the control group were lactate, O-phosphoethanolamine, aspartate, glycine, ascorbate, taurine. The marker metabolites in thymus were as follow:lactate, glycine, ascorbate, taurine, O-phosphocholine, alanine.