Spatiotemporal lipidomics in living tissue

Subjects

Typical spatial biology experiments are destructive or are performed on non-living tissue. However, there is growing interest in being able to monitor biology in action. A team of researchers from King’s College London led by Ciro Chiappini has developed a workflow that uses silicon nanoneedles to repeatedly collect biomolecules from live tissue to generate imprints called molecular replicas and map lipid distribution through desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry imaging (DESI). “The key advance lies in the ability to perform this sampling non-destructively and repeatedly on the same tissue, enabling true spatiotemporal molecular profiling,” says Chiappini.

The researchers worked with human and mouse glioma biopsies. Gliomas reprogram lipid metabolomics for their growth and are thus an ideal model for spatiotemporal lipidomics experiments. Lipid composition was monitored over 5 days following the first nanoneedle imprinting. They show that molecular replicas matched corresponding tissue sections in their performance for grading glioma samples. They also show that they successfully captured key brain morphological features, species abundance and spatial distribution observed in the original tissue. They further demonstrate that the technique was able to capture lipid- and sample-specific temporal changes in response to chemotherapy.

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