#metabolomics — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #metabolomics, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: September 2, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Maternal sleep latency during early pregnancy is linked to child intelligence scores
Pregnant people often experience changes in their sleep patterns, but the long-term effects of these disruptions on the developing fetus are not fully understood. A recent study suggests that maternal sleep difficulties, particularly taking a long time to fall asleep, are associated with slightly lower intelligence scores in children at age four. The research, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, also points to specific metabolic chemicals in the pregnant person’s blood that might link poor sleep to offspring brain development.
Nearly half of pregnant individuals report experiencing poor sleep quality. During pregnancy, hormonal, physical, and psychological shifts can dramatically alter a person’s sleep and wake cycles. Concurrently, fetal brain development occurs at a rapid pace.
Because the developing brain is highly adaptable, it is sensitive to the prenatal environment. Prior research has connected maternal sleep problems to adverse outcomes like preterm birth and low birth weight. Animal models have indicated that maternal sleep deprivation alters fetal brain structures, specifically areas involved in memory and learning.
Human studies have also hinted at a connection between prenatal sleep and a child’s cognitive outcomes. Most of these investigations assessed sleep at only one point in time. Pregnancy involves distinct phases of neural system development, meaning the timing of sleep disruptions could influence the brain differently. The basic architectural structures of the brain form rapidly during the first trimester. While the third trimester involves brain growth and maturation, the groundwork laid earlier makes early-pregnancy exposures particularly impactful.
Sleep is a foundational biological process that regulates metabolism. Disrupted sleep can alter glucose processing, increase inflammation, and change how the body breaks down nutrients. Researchers Yun Huang and Jun Zhang of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine wanted to track how sleep patterns throughout all three trimesters related to child intelligence. They also aimed to identify specific chemical markers, or metabolites, that might explain this biological connection.
The researchers analyzed data from 1,870 mother and child pairs enrolled in the Shanghai Birth Cohort. During their first, second, and third trimesters, the pregnant participants completed questionnaires detailing their sleep habits. These surveys asked about sleep duration, subjective sleep quality, and sleep latency. Sleep latency is the amount of time it takes to transition from full wakefulness to sleep.
When the children reached four years of age, trained staff evaluated their intelligence using a standardized assessment called the Wechsler Primary and Preschool Scale of Intelligence. This test measures a child’s full-scale intelligence quotient, or IQ, alongside specific cognitive abilities. Verbal comprehension measures a child’s ability to access and apply acquired word knowledge. Fluid reasoning evaluates the capacity to detect underlying conceptual relationships and use reasoning to solve novel problems.
The researchers used statistical models to compare the maternal sleep data from each trimester with the children’s test scores. They adjusted their calculations to account for maternal age, education, physical activity, and family history of mental disorders.
The analysis showed an association between taking longer to fall asleep and lower cognitive scores. Longer sleep latency in the first trimester was linked to lower full-scale IQ and lower verbal comprehension scores. In the second trimester, longer sleep latency was associated with lower fluid reasoning scores. Sleep difficulties in the third trimester did not yield statistically significant associations with the children’s test scores.
Next, the researchers evaluated how consistent sleep patterns across the entirety of pregnancy related to child brain development. They used a statistical technique to group participants based on how their sleep quality changed from the first trimester to the third. This longitudinal approach allowed the team to see the cumulative impact of sleep struggles. They found that individuals who consistently experienced longer sleep latency throughout their entire pregnancy had children with lower full-scale IQ, verbal comprehension, and fluid reasoning scores at age four.
To understand the biological mechanisms behind these observations, the researchers looked at metabolites. Metabolites are small molecules produced when the body breaks down food, chemicals, or its own tissue. The team analyzed fasting blood samples taken from 1,461 of the pregnant participants during their first trimester.
The researchers conducted untargeted metabolomic profiling. Instead of looking for a few specific chemicals, this technique scans the blood for hundreds of small molecules simultaneously, providing a broad snapshot of the body’s metabolic state. After identifying 413 metabolites in the maternal serum, they used a “meet-in-the-middle” analytical strategy. They first looked for metabolites linked to maternal sleep factors, then looked for metabolites linked to child test scores, and finally focused on the overlapping chemicals that connected the two endpoints.
Three specific molecules emerged as potential mediators: inositol, indoleacrylic acid, and 4-hydroxyquinoline. Inositol is a sugar that is synthesized by the body and found in common foods like fruits and beans. It is transferred across the placenta to the fetus, where it contributes to neurotransmitter signaling. The researchers observed an indirect path where maternal sleep duration was linked to child fluid reasoning through changes in maternal inositol levels.
Indoleacrylic acid and 4-hydroxyquinoline are byproducts of tryptophan, an amino acid involved in producing sleep-regulating hormones like serotonin and melatonin. Poor sleep can alter how the body breaks down tryptophan, increasing inflammatory pathways and changing the availability of serotonin, a hormone essential for neuronal growth. The researchers found that sleep disturbances influenced offspring verbal comprehension via alterations in these two tryptophan-related molecules.
The study relied on self-reported questionnaires to assess maternal sleep. These surveys capture a person’s subjective perception of their rest, which might differ from objective measurements like brainwave monitoring or movement tracking devices. The metabolic analysis only tested blood samples from the first trimester. A person’s metabolic profile can fluctuate due to diet and physical activity, meaning a single measurement might not capture the full biological environment across the entire pregnancy.
The large number of metabolites tested also increases the mathematical risk of identifying false associations, requiring future studies to validate these specific chemical links. Most participants in this sample had a college degree, meaning the findings might not generalize to populations with different educational or socioeconomic backgrounds. Because sleep disturbances are sometimes a symptom of underlying psychiatric conditions, residual genetic or environmental factors could still influence the outcomes.
The study, “Maternal sleep disturbance during pregnancy and child intelligence quotient: A metabolome-wide association study in the Shanghai Birth Cohort,” was authored by Yun Huang, Fei Luo, Guanghai Wang, Ting Zhang, Lin Zhang, Lichun Fan, and Jun Zhang.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MaternalSleep #PregnancyHealth #SleepLatency #ChildIQ #PrenatalNutrition #Metabolomics #TryptophanPathways #FetalBrainDevelopment #WechslerIQ #ShanghaiBirthCohort
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It's always fun meeting with high-school lab assistants and getting to explain PCA (draw a banana!), where additive and proportional error come from (measure lots of times!), and that -omics data in general have these, regardless of technology.
Which reminded me of two of my favorite posters.
Visualization of error in omics technologies
https://figshare.com/articles/poster/Characterization_and_Visualization_of_Error_in_Omics_Technologies/1431927?file=2191588Visualizing the effects of data transformations
https://figshare.com/articles/poster/Visualizing_the_Effects_of_Data_Transformations_on_Errors/3168775?file=4933519 -
new paper: "Computational metabolomics at scale: from open data to insight" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2026.103557 #metabolomics
"Metabolomics stands at a pivotal moment where the volume, diversity, and richness of publicly available data offer unprecedented opportunities for discovery"
It describes the results from a series of Dagstuhl meeting. I attended a few (not this year). It gives a good overview of where the field may be going, and perhaps should be going. Happy to have been part of this community!
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Metabolomics of single-strain & co-cultures of 7 Fusarium strains causing #metabolome head blight reveals metabolic modifications induced by strain co-occurrence.
FHB #metabolomics reveals species‑specific biomarkers & interaction‑driven shifts in co‑cultures
#microbiology #agriculture #metabolome #Ag
https://davidojcius.blogspot.com/2026/08/how-fusarium-strain-co-occurrence.html
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New lab publication:
High-Quality Predicted Metabolite-Pathway Annotations Expand Pathway Coverage and Increase Enriched Pathway Detection Across Metabolomics Datasets, by Huckvale et al
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/16/8/545
We show that the metabolite pathway annotation pipeline we've been building improves annotation enrichment results using GSEA on 990 datasets from Metabolomics Workbench.
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Want to participate in a remote #Metabolomics conference?
Deadline for abstract submission to the International Electronic Conference on Metabolomics 2026 is July 17th.
Yes, it's funded by MDPI. I understand if you don't register because of that. But there are many genuinely good speakers who will be there, and yours truly will hopefully be presenting their work on trying to do QC/QA of the entirety of Metabolomics Workbench!
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New co-authored manuscript on liver cancer multi-omics:
Integrated Multi-omic Analyses Reveal Novel Gene-Metabolite Relationships in Human Steatohepatitic Hepatocellular Carcinoma
Anspach et al., https://www.jlr.org/article/S0022-2275(26)00107-0/fulltext8 patients, *paired samples* of cancer and adjacent normal!! (made the statistics so nice to work with and look for correlations between rna-seq and metabolomics).
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Everytime I think that uploaded #metabolomics data can't get any weirder, I find something else.
Today, it's 1 sample out of 64 that has negative values. ONE out of 64 that has negative values. Unless something weird was done in processing, either all of them should contain negative values or none of them should. 🤦♂️
All missing for one sample, that sort of, might make sense. But 1 of 64 has negatives? WTF. And it's not just one value, it's 64 of 407.
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📢 Call for Papers: Computational Spatial Omics - Multimodal Strategies for Systems Biology and Biomedical Discovery
⏳ Submission Deadline: 31 December 2026
🔗 Submit your work: https://spj.science.org/journal/csbj/si/computational-spatial-omics
#CallForPapers #SpatialOmics #SpatialTranscriptomics #SpatialProteomics #Metabolomics #Lipidomics #Multiomics #ComputationalBiology #SystemsBiology #Bioinformatics #AIinHealthcare #DigitalPathology #GraphNeuralNetworks #PrecisionMedicine
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UC San Diego: From Molecules to Meaning: A Search Engine for the Chemistry of Life. “An international team led by researchers at University of California San Diego and University of California, Riverside has developed a free, web-based platform designed to make public metabolomics data more accessible.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/05/14/from-molecules-to-meaning-a-search-engine-for-the-chemistry-of-life-uc-san-diego/ -
Working with data from Metabolomics Workbench again, and it always feels like the data is yelling at me with the fields in all caps.
Now that I've double checked, the Protein Data Bank file format was like this too, all caps everywhere (even more so).
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Researchers have identified composite blood biomarkers—specific combinations of proteins and metabolites—that can reliably detect early stages of colorectal, lung, and ovarian cancers.
#Oncology #Proteomics #Metabolomics #Pathology #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/04/ongy04202601.html -
Why has GC-MS (gas chromatography- electron impact ioniation- mass spectrometry) had such enduring value for the field of metabolomics? How do we identify metabolites based on mass spectrometry data?
I hope you'll enjoy this video explaining the basics of GC-MS and the spectral library methods we use for explaining these spectra!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTWXkHPHEI0
#bioinformatics
#metabolomics #GCMS -
Why would we choose to measure just a few metabolites instead of doing a broad untargeted survey? In two words: "quantitative precision"
This is the first lecture recording I have produced with my new home video setup!
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📢 Call for Papers: Metabolome-Microbiome in Health and Diseases for One Health
⏳ Submission Deadline: 31 May 2026
🔗 Submit your work: https://spj.science.org/journal/csbj/si/metabolome-microbiome-health-diseases
#CallForPapers #Metabolomics #Microbiome #SystemsBiology #OneHealth #DiseaseBiology #MedicalInformatics #Phenomics
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I really appreciated this detailed post from Nicola Zamboni on #bioinformatics for #metabolomics !
https://metabolomics.blog/2026/03/how-we-analyze-untargeted-metabolomics-data/
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Researchers discovered that a metabolite known as pTOS, which drastically elevates in #pythons after large meals, successfully reduces food intake and drives weight loss in #obese laboratory mice.
#Endocrinology #Pathology #Metabolomics #Zoology #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/03/bio03192602.html -
New preprint!
An Integrated Multi-omic Analysis Reveals Novel Gene-Metabolite Relationships in Human Steatohepatitic Hepatocellular Carcinoma
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.26344977v1Colleagues took paired samples of hepatocellularcarcinoma from several patients (8), and did bulk RNA-Seq, lipidomics, and metabolomics on the samples.
We analyzed the data to see what was different in each modality, as well as what correlations could be found between RNA-Seq and metabolomics.
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Y'all. I was having a full on Pikachu face today when I found discrepancies in what metabolites were included in my datasets and what were included in a colleagues datasets when we processed identical experiments from Metabolomics Workbench (I am borrowing some stuff they did with the exact same experiments to supplement my own work).
Digging into it, I'm removing things that are missing across more than X number of samples, the colleague kept everything. 😮💨
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New lab paper is out! We've released our python package mwtab v2 for interacting with the Metabolomics Workbench (MW) website, and updated the file status website with some measures of issues with the data available from MW!
A Major Update and Improved Validation Functionality in the mwtab Python Library and the Metabolomics Workbench File Status Website
https://doi.org/10.3390/metabo16010076If you want a programmatic way to get data from MW, this might be useful.
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#metabolomics postdoc "The exact focus will be tailored to the candidate’s strengths and evolving opportunities in the field." https://jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOPG_ethz_1gSP4dmYD54u5EqbLs
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#Cancer immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that harnesses the #immune system to fight cancer cells. The treatment involves #CD8⁺ T cells, also known as killer T cells, which play a crucial role in attacking #tumors
#Immunology #Oncology #Metabolomics #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/01/imgy01212601.html