7 years, 20 researchers and a whole lot of pee has allowed for a much more accurate chemical composition of urine to be determined. This has a number of knock on effects throughout scientific research, especially in the identification and treatment of medical disorders.
Urine is a beautiful thing; available in every shade of yellow, sterile, chemically complex and one of the most ready available biofluids in the world. However, because of urine's vast complexity, it has been difficult to fully understand each of its components, and what those components can tell us about the person who supplied it.
Urine usually contains metabolic breakdown products from the food that we eat and drink, contaminants we absorb from the environment as well as the by-products of certain bacteria. The issue is the amount of information that we have about each of these components, which leaves us with a gap in our scientific knowledge on this substance.
To try and remedy this gap in our knowledge, researchers at the University of Alberta set out to improve their knowledge by conducting an extensive and intense period of research which would provide a quantitative characterization of urine. Doing this involved employing NMR spectoscopy, gas chromotography, mess spectrometry and high performance liquid chromotography.
Through the use of these technologies over 3000 previously unknown urine metabolites were identified. It is important for us to understand these metabolites, as they are often the products of a large number of different processes in the body, and can therefore give us an incredibly clear understanding of an organisms phenotype, from a source which is incredibly easy to obtain (pee).
Now it might sound like that's an awful lot of effort to go through just to further understand our pee. However, this research will have massive implications on healthcare in the future. A persons urine can not only tell us a huge amount of information about someones health, but also their diet, what they drink, drugs they are taking and potential pollutants that they may have been exposed to. This can allow a physician to quickly identify a number of things about a patient through analysis of their urine, giving us the potential to save numerous lives through the identification of things like disease metabolites, allowing for quick treatment saving precious time.
What do you think about this research? Will it make you look at your pee in a different way from now on? Comment below with your thoughts.
If you want to know any more about the experiments the team undertook then you can find the original research paper here.
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