Abstract
The behavior of an animal has substantial effects on its metabolism. Such effects, including changes in the lipid composition of different organs, or changes in the turnover of the proteins, have typically been observed using liquid mass spectrometry methods, averaging the effect of animal behavior across tissue samples containing multiple cells. These methods have provided the scientific community with valuable information, but have limited resolution, making it difficult if not impossible to examine metabolic effects at the cellular and subcellular levels. Recent advances in the field of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) have made it possible to examine the metabolic effects of animal behavior with high resolution at the nanoscale, enabling the analysis of the metabolic effects of behavior on individual cells. In this review we summarize and present these emerging methods, beginning with an overview of the SIMS technique. We then discuss the specific application of nanoscale SIMS (NanoSIMS) to examine cell behavior. This often requires the use of isotope labeling to highlight specific sections of the cell for analysis, an approach that is presented at length in this review article. We also present SIMS applications concerning animal and cell behavior, from development and aging to changes in the cellular activity programs. We conclude that the emerging group of SIMS technologies represents an exciting set of tools for the study of animal behavior and of its effects on internal metabolism at the smallest possible scales.
Highlights
Recent years have produced large advances in the analysis of the general aspects of proteins, including ‘‘omics’’ studies for protein abundance (Antonelli et al, 2019; Noor et al, 2019), analysis techniques for the abundance of mRNA (Washburn et al, 2019), analyses of protein translation rates (Riba et al, 2019; Sharma et al, 2019) and much more
We present three case studies that have used NanoSIMS to examine the behavior of individual cells, and we discuss the broader applications of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) in biological and environmental studies
In further sections of this article, we present three examples of the combination of isotope labeling and NanoSIMS to examine the behavior of cells in various organs
Summary
Recent years have produced large advances in the analysis of the general aspects of proteins, including ‘‘omics’’ studies for protein abundance (Antonelli et al, 2019; Noor et al, 2019), analysis techniques for the abundance of mRNA (Washburn et al, 2019), analyses of protein translation rates (Riba et al, 2019; Sharma et al, 2019) and much more. Substantial progress has been made in microscopy techniques for imaging the location of proteins and the general morphology of cells. Optical microscopy techniques have been able to observe cellular processes at the nanoscale (Schermelleh et al, 2019). X-ray imaging and tomography techniques are progressing and are useful tools in the cellular study
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