Abstract B32: Role of membrane lipids in colonocytes maturation revealed by mass spectrometry-base imaging techniques

The epithelial layer of the human colon form finger-like invaginations into the underlying connective tissue of the lamina propria to establish the basic functional unit of the intestine, the crypt. Adult stems cells, located at the crypt base, proliferate and differentiate into the mature lineages of the surface epithelium. It is know that any alteration of the pathways regulating stem cell renewal leads to tumor formation. In this context, little is know about how processes as cell differentiation or tumorigenesis affect one of the critical components of a cell: the plasma membrane. Thus, plasma membrane by regulating its lipid composition determines the membrane physical properties, which in turn modulates the activity of receptors, the starting point in many signaling pathways.Mass spectrometry-based imaging (MSI) techniques allow mapping each detected analyte within a tissue section providing spatial information that is crucial to understand the biochemical complexity occurring in living organisms. There are different MSI techniques but MALDI-MS (Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry) turned out to be particularly suitable for lipid analyses. We took advantage of this fact and we established by MSI techniques the distribution of human mucosa lipid species in 10 μm thick sections obtained from human colonoscopic biopsies. The high spatial resolution achieved, 5 μM, allowed to discriminate the lipid composition of epithelium, lamina propria an...
Source: Molecular Cancer Research - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: Other Topics: Poster Presentations - Proffered Abstracts Source Type: research