Quantitative lipidomic analysis of mouse lung during postnatal development by electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry.

Vannuruswamy Garikapati,Gerd Schmitz,Bernhard Spengler,Harald Ehrhardt,Srikanth Karnati,Gerhard Liebisch,Eveline Baumgart-Vogt,Paul P Van Veldhoven

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203464

Vannuruswamy Garikapati, Gerd Schmitz + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203464

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Abstract

Lipids play very important roles in lung biology, mainly reducing the alveolar surface tension at the air-liquid interface thereby preventing end-expiratory collapse of the alveoli. In the present study we performed an extensive quantitative lipidomic analysis of mouse lung to provide the i) total lipid quantity, ii) distribution pattern of the major lipid classes, iii) composition of individual lipid species and iv) glycerophospholipid distribution pattern according to carbon chain length (total number of carbon atoms) and degree of unsaturation (total number of double bonds). We analysed and quantified 160 glycerophospholipid species, 24 sphingolipid species, 18 cholesteryl esters and cholesterol from lungs of a) newborn (P1), b) 15-day-old (P15) and c) 12-week-old adult mice (P84) to understand the changes occurring during postnatal pulmonary development. Our results revealed an increase in total lipid quantity, correlation of lipid class distribution in lung tissue and significant changes in the individual lipid species composition during postnatal lung development. Interestingly, we observed significant stage-specific alterations during this process. Especially, P1 lungs showed high content of monounsaturated lipid species; P15 lungs exhibited myristic and palmitic acid containing lipid species, whereas adult lungs were enriched with polyunsaturated lipid species. Taken together, our study provides an extensive quantitative lipidome of the postnatal mouse lung development, which may serve as a reference for a better understanding of lipid alterations and their functions in lung development and respiratory diseases associated with lipids.

Highlights

The lung is composed of more than 40 different pulmonary cell types, whose cellular membranes are enriched with lipids that perform a variety of functions including maintenance of the lung architecture [1,2,3]
Our current study provides an extensive quantitative lipidome of mouse whole lung, which may serve as a reference for a better understanding of the development of lung and molecular mechanisms underlying various pulmonary diseases associated with the lipid alterations
The current study presents an extensive quantitative lipidome analysis of the total mouse lung homogenates during the postnatal development performed with the help of electrospray ionization (ESI)-tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS)

Summary

Introduction

The lung is composed of more than 40 different pulmonary cell types, whose cellular membranes are enriched with lipids that perform a variety of functions including maintenance of the lung architecture [1,2,3]. Alveolar epithelial type II cells of the pulmonary epithelium that are lining the alveolar surface synthesize and secrete surfactant into the alveolar space. The majority of the pulmonary lipids comprise glycerophospholipids (GP) in which phosphatidylcholine (PC) is a predominant lipid class making up to 50% of the phospholipids. Alterations in whole lung lipid composition and/or deficiency of pulmonary surfactant lipids are closely associated with a) respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) [13], b) bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) [13, 14], c) asthma [15], d) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) [15, 16], e) cystic fibrosis [17], f) pneumonia [17, 18], g) lung injury [19], h) cancer [20] and in other lung diseases [6, 21]

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