Hepatic effect of subacute Fe 2 O 3 nanoparticles exposure in Sprague-Dawley rats by LC-MS/MS based lipidomics.

Fe2 O3 nanoparticles (Fe2 O3 NPs) are one of the components of food additives numbered E172 and have been widely used as food pigments to color sweets. Although there were a large number of studies have reported that Fe2 O3 NPs could induce hepatotoxicity, the pathogenesis is still unclear, especially the subacute effects on the metabolic network after oral exposure. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a highly sensitive strategy to investigate the potential effects and their mechanism of Fe2 O3 NPs. In this study, animal experiment showed that Fe2 O3 NPs had no obvious toxic effects on body weight, histopathological inspection and oxide stress. In order to further investigate the potential effects of Fe2 O3 NPs in vivo, a more sensitive LC-MS/MS-based lipidomics was performed. The results of multivariate statistical analysis and western blot showed that Fe2 O3 NPs exposure would significantly affect the hepatic glycerophospholipid metabolism, with decreasing of triacylglycerol (TG), diglyceride (DG), lysophosphatidylethanolamine (LPE) and free fatty acid (FFA), and increasing of phosphatidylcholine (PC), lysophosphatidylinositol (LPI) and coenzyme Q9. These data provided a further insight into the hepatic subacute effects of Fe2 O3 NPs obtained by conventional toxicology methods.