Abstract: The global increase in the prevalence of gestational diabetes mellitus(GDM)in recent years has prompted the study of the effect of GDM on the metabolism between mother and fetus. In this study, the metabolomic investigation of the umbilical cord blood of mothers presenting GDM was performed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), and network analysis to assess GDM-related metabolic biomarkers. The results showed that arachidonic acid (AA) played an important role in the key metabolic network while further pathway analysis suggested that GDM induced unsaturated fatty acid metabolic disorder. This study provides the underlying metabolic mechanism of GDM-induced metabolic abnormalities between mother and fetus.

Key words: fatty acids, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), metabolomics, network analysis