Metabolic profiling of the tissue-specific responses in mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis towards Vibrio harveyi challenge

• Mussel revealed tissue-specific metabolic responses to Vibrio harveyi challenge.
• V. harveyi induced osmotic, oxidative and immune stresses in mussel tissues.
• Metabolomics is useful to investigate pathogen-induced effects in mussel.

Mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis is a marine aquaculture shellfish distributing widely along the coast in north China. In this work, we studied the differential metabolic responses induced by Vibrio harveyi in digestive gland and gill tissues from M. galloprovincialis using NMR-based metabolomics. The differential metabolic responses in the two tissue types were detected, except the similarly altered taurine and betaine. These metabolic responses suggested that V. harveyi mainly induced osmotic disruption and reduced energy demand via the metabolic pathways of glucose synthesis and ATP/AMP conversion in mussel digestive gland. In mussel gill tissues, V. harveyi basically caused osmotic stress and possible reduced energy demand as shown by the elevated phosphocholine that is involved in one of the metabolic pathways of ATP synthesis from ADP and phosphocholine. The altered mRNA expression levels of related genes (superoxide dismutase with copper and zinc, heat shock protein 90, defensin and lysozyme) suggested that V. harveyi induced clear oxidative and immune stresses in both digestive gland and gill tissues. However, the mRNA expression levels of both lysozyme and defensin in digestive gland were more significantly up-regulated than those in gill from V. harveyi-challenged mussel M. galloprovincialis, meaning that the immune organ, digestive gland, was more sensitive than gill. Overall, our results indicated that V. harveyi could induce tissue-specific metabolic responses in mussel M. galloprovincialis.