Spatially-guided metabolomics profiling of metabolic regions in human tumor tissues

Abstract Bulk high-resolution mass spectrometry provides sensitive and global snapshots of metabolites involved in cancer metabolism. However, intratumoral heterogeneity obscures the cellular origins of detected metabolites, making it difficult to identify reproducible and predictive metabolic markers. Here, we present “Spatially guided MEtabolomics (SgME) profiling”, a multi-modal metabolomics data analysis approach that delineates and maps metabolic regions (MERs), including overlapping regions, within tumor tissues. We applied SgME profiling to human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tumors and refined potential RNA markers that were also found in previous transcriptomics or bioinformatics studies to those specifically associated with malignant regions. We further estimated that more than 50% of the highly abundant metabolites detected in bulk tumors originated from the non-malignant MERs and are therefore unlikely to be predictive and/or reproducible markers. Importantly, SgME profiling also revealed new potential metabolic markers that were not apparent in bulk analysis because they increased in low-grade tumor regions but declined sharply in necrotic regions. Together, these findings show that SgME profiling overcomes key limitations of conventional metabolomics profiling by enabling more granular, spatially resolved metabolic characterization.