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| Secrets of what's in our urine revealed Image credit Wikimedia Commons |
Urine has more compounds than previously known
Now researchers know more about your pee than ever
before. University of Alberta scientists say they have uncovered the
chemical composition of human urine, finding there are more than 3,000
metabolites.
The finding means new ways
to discover what’s going on in the environment and in our bodies.
David Wishart, the senior
scientist for investigation said in a press release, "Urine is an
incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds
going into our toilets.”
He adds, "Most
medical textbooks only list 50 to 100 chemicals in urine, and most common
clinical urine tests only measure six to seven compounds.”
Expanding our knowledge of
what we metabolize in our urine means faster, more inexpensive, less invasive
and painless ways to test for a variety of diseases.
For their study, the
researchers used several sophisticated tools including nuclear magnetic
resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid
chromatography to discover a wider range of compounds in pee than
previously known.
They also looked at
100-years of scientific literature from an online data base about urine called
the Urine Metabolome Database, or UMDB.
What’s a urine metabolome?
In case you too got caught
on the work ‘metabalome”, the researchers explain it’s a combination of
metabolites and genome. Studying urine metabolites and genomes is part of a
larger project aimed at identifying all of the metabalomes in the human body.
"This is certainly
not the final word on the chemical composition of urine," Wishart said.
"As new techniques are developed and as more sensitive instruments are
produced, I am sure that hundreds more urinary compounds will be identified.”
If you want to keep up
with what’s in your pee, you may want to check the database regularly. More
information is being posted daily. Wishart adds the human metabalome project
will have a more significant and immediate impact on human health than the humangenome project.
Diagnosing colon and
prostate cancer, celiac disease, ulcerative colitis, pneumonia and organ
transplant rejection with a simple urine test is already in the making. Researchers now know there are at least 3,000
metabolites in urine that can help reveal the state of our health.
Source: PloS
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