FIG 8.

Altered long-chain fatty acid and glycerophospholipid metabolism associated with hepatic steatosis. (A) mol% of SFA, MUFA, and PUFA liver content assessed by gas chromatography. (B) Relative abundances of ω6 and ω3 PUFAs normalized to CON values. (C) WGCNA results. (Left) Associations between metabolomic clusters and clinical traits; (right) associations between group and diet (right). Start_Mal_Diet and End_Mal_Diet describe malnourished versus healthy diet, i.e., MBG/MBG-R versus CON/C-MBG and MBG/C-MBG versus CON/MBG-R, respectively. The size and color of the circle represent the Spearman correlation coefficient between metabolomic module and clinical/group traits with significance (Padj  < 0.05). WGCNA randomly assigned modules a color name. Three modules were annotated for further analyses: (i) “yellow/GP1” (positive correlation with hepatic steatosis: glycerophopholipid enriched), (ii) “turquoise/GP2” (negative correlation with hepatic steatosis: glycerophospholipid and SFA enriched), and (iii) “red/BA” (no correlation; bile acid enriched). Data in panels A, B, and C are from the same mouse reversal experiment (eight mice per group). Bars indicate means ± SEM with statistical significance determined by ANOVA with post hoc Tukey’s test. Further WGCNA findings are in Table S3 and Text S1 in the supplemental material.