Inside the Brain’s Hidden Lipid Map

Spatial mass spectrometry reveals how 172 lipids vary across brain regions, cell types, and physiological states

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Researchers used MALDI-MSI to map lipids at 7.2 million locations across 109 brain sections from 11 adult mice.
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After quality checks and annotation, analyses focused on 172 nonredundant lipids and identified 539 lipid-defined brain regions, or lipizones.
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The atlas showed lipid patterns distinguishing grey and white matter, cortical layers, ventricular structures, and other anatomical regions.
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Pregnancy was associated with broader lipid changes than differences between male and nonpregnant female mice, including white matter and cortical layer 4 changes.
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The atlas may aid mouse disease research, but it does not establish diagnostic biomarkers, and its findings require validation in human tissue and clinical samples.

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