**First Insights into the Urinary Metabolome of Captive Gira** ff**es by Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy**

#### **Chenglin Zhu 1,**†**, Sabrina Fasoli 2,**†**, Gloria Isani 2 and Luca Laghi 1,\***


Received: 13 March 2020; Accepted: 15 April 2020; Published: 17 April 2020

**Abstract:** The urine from 35 gira ffes was studied by untargeted 1H-NMR, with the purpose of obtaining, for the first time, a fingerprint of its metabolome. The metabolome, as downstream of the transcriptome and proteome, has been considered as the most representative approach to monitor the relationships between animal physiological features and environment. Thirty-nine molecules were unambiguously quantified, able to give information about diet, proteins digestion, energy generation, and gut-microbial co-metabolism. The samples collected allowed study of the e ffects of age and sex on the gira ffe urinary metabolome. In addition, preliminary information about how sampling procedure and pregnancy could a ffect a gira ffe's urinary metabolome was obtained. Such work could trigger the setting up of methods to non-invasively study the health status of gira ffes, which is utterly needed, considering that anesthetic-related complications make their immobilization a very risky practice.

**Keywords:** captive gira ffes; urine; metabolomics; 1H-NMR
