Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a serious mood disorder and leads to a high suicide rate as well as financial burden. The volume and function (the sensitivity and neurogenesis) of the olfactory bulb (OB) were reported to be altered among the MDD patients and rodent models of depression. In addition, the olfactory epithelium was newly reported to decrease its volume and function under chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) treatment. However, the underlying molecular mechanism still remains unclear. Herein, we conducted the non-targeted metabolomics method based on gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) coupled with multivariate statistical analysis to characterize the differential metabolites in OB of CUMS rats. Our results showed that 19 metabolites were categorized into two perturbed pathways: purine metabolism and lipid metabolism, which were regarded as the vital pathways concerned with dysfunction of OB. These findings indicated that the turbulence of metabolic pathways may be partly responsible for the dysfunction of OB in MDD.

中文翻译：

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嘌呤和脂质的代谢组异常涉及CUMS抑郁大鼠的嗅球功能障碍。

重度抑郁症（MDD）是一种严重的情绪障碍，会导致较高的自杀率以及经济负担。据报道，在MDD患者和抑郁的啮齿动物模型中，嗅球（OB）的体积和功能（敏感性和神经发生）发生了改变。另外，新报道嗅觉上皮在慢性不可预测的轻度应激（CUMS）治疗下减少了其体积和功能。但是，潜在的分子机制仍然不清楚。在这里，我们进行了基于气相色谱-质谱（GC-MS）结合多变量统计分析的非目标代谢组学方法，以表征CUMS大鼠OB中的差异代谢产物。我们的结果表明，将19种代谢物分为两种干扰途径：嘌呤代谢和脂质代谢，这些被认为是与OB功能障碍有关的重要途径。这些发现表明，代谢途径的紊乱可能是导致MDD中OB功能障碍的部分原因。