Alteration of metabolite profiling by cold atmospheric plasma treatment in human myeloma cells

Dehui Xu†Email author,
Yujing Xu,
Ning Ning,
Qingjie Cui,
Zhijie Liu,
Xiaohua Wang,
Dingxin Liu,
Hailan Chen and
Michael G. Kong†Email author

†Contributed equally

Cancer Cell International201818:42

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12935-018-0541-z

Received: 9 December 2017

Accepted: 14 March 2018

Published: 20 March 2018

Abstract

Background

Despite new progress of chemotherapy in multiple myeloma (MM) clinical treatment, MM is still a refractory disease and new technology is needed to improve the outcomes and prolong the survival. Cold atmospheric plasma is a rapidly developed technology in recent years, which has been widely applied in biomedicine. Although plasma could efficiently inactivate various tumor cells, the effects of plasma on tumor cell metabolism have not been studied yet.

Methods

In this study, we investigated the metabolite profiling of He plasma treatment on myeloma tumor cells by gas-chromatography time-of-flight (GC-TOF) mass-spectrometry. Meanwhile, by bioinformatic analysis such as GO and KEGG analysis we try to figure out the metabolism pathway that was significantly affected by gas plasma treatment.

Results

By GC-TOF mass-spectrometry, 573 signals were detected and evaluated using PCA and OPLS-DA. By KEGG analysis we listed all the differential metabolites and further classified into different metabolic pathways. The results showed that beta-alanine metabolism pathway was the most significant change after He gas plasma treatment in myeloma cells. Besides, propanoate metabolism and linoleic acid metabolism should also be concerned during gas plasma treatment of cancer cells.

Conclusions

Cold atmospheric plasma treatment could significantly alter the metabolite profiling of myeloma tumor cells, among which, the beta-alanine metabolism pathway is the most susceptible to He gas plasma treatment.