Lipidomic Analysis Reveals Serum Alteration of Plasmalogens in Patients Infected With ZIKA Virus

Discussion Our strategy in this study was to compare the serum lipid profile between ZIKV patients and symptomatic controls that presented virus-like symptoms as fever, arthralgia, headache, exanthema, myalgia and pruritus. Retro-orbital pain and fever were the only clinical symptoms that significantly distinguished ZIKV and control groups (Table 1). A recent study by Melo et al. (2017) showed that the differences in metabolic and lipid profiles in serum of ZIKV patients are so pronounced that they can be differentiated from a control group composed of both healthy and symptomatic subjects. Thus, by using symptomatic patients as control, we assume that lipid alterations are largely related to ZIKV rather than any other viruses, and likely accounts for the heterogeneity between symptomatic and healthy subjects. Alterations in lipid homeostasis have been associated with many viral infections (Meertens et al., 2012; Martin-Acebes et al., 2014; Richard et al., 2015; Carnec et al., 2016; Jordan and Randall, 2016). While most of the information about lipid metabolism of host cells and flavivirus come from in vitro experiments, there exist just a few, but relevant studies evidencing alterations in serum lipidome caused by flavivirus infection (Cui et al., 2013; Schoeman et al., 2016; Melo et al., 2017, 2018). Fortunately, one of these studies was performed with ZIKV using a metabolomics approach with direct infusion mass spectrometry and database search for ion characterization (M...
Source: Frontiers in Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Source Type: research