{"id":642491,"date":"2026-10-27T05:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T05:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/642491\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T05:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T05:26:08","slug":"lipids-enter-brain-mapping-limelight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/642491\/","title":{"rendered":"Lipids enter brain mapping limelight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brain mapping efforts, so far dominated by transcriptomics and connectomics<\/a>, are putting a spotlight on lipids of late.<\/p>\n

A new atlas<\/a> described last month in Nature lays out the spatial distribution of 172 membrane lipids across 109 brain sections of 11 mice, with unprecedented resolution. Lipids cluster into 539 distinct regions, dubbed \u201clipizones,\u201d and paint a picture of brain structure that is as intricate as, and distinct from, what is visible on gene expression maps.<\/p>\n

Most read <\/p>\n

A temporal trace<\/a> of brain lipids, published in July in Science Advances, shows that they change in quiescent neural stem cells, which are in a reversible state of nonproliferation.\u00a0As mice age, these cells shift toward lipids with polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) side chains that are highly unsaturated, and, as a result, the cells have less ordered membranes. \u201cThis could be related to their functional decline,\u201d says study investigator Xiaoai Zhao<\/a>, assistant professor of comparative medicine at Yale School of Medicine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The two studies represent important progress in an otherwise understudied field of neuroscience, says Bruce Cohen<\/a>, Robertson-Steele Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in either study.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGenes and proteins are the prom kings and queens\u201d of neuroscience, he says, but lipids deserve attention, too: They constitute the membranes of cells, organelles and the nucleus; they provide energy, serve as signaling molecules and, in people with late-onset Alzheimer\u2019s disease, become altered in astrocytes<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything that goes on with a cell goes across a membrane, along a membrane, within a membrane,\u201d Cohen adds. \u201cMost of us aren\u2019t adequately exposed to the importance of lipids, and we should be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n O<\/p>\n

ne reason that brain lipids have been understudied is that they\u2019re complex, says Gioele La Manno<\/a>, assistant professor at \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne and an investigator on the Nature atlas. The same lipid can be synthesized through multiple pathways, and, conversely, \u201cif you change one enzyme, you don\u2019t only change one lipid, but you change maybe 100 of them,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new brain atlas, created using mass spectrometry imaging, does not map neatly onto other ones, which trace the RNA expression of lipid-producing enzymes, metabolism-related genes or the full Allen Brain Atlas transcriptome, the team found.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For La Manno, that was a surprise, he says, and he recalls stating in an \u201coverassertive tone\u201d early in his Ph.D. program, \u201cIf there is something that changes in a cell, you should be able to see it in the RNA because [the gene] is where everything comes from.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Most of us aren\u2019t adequately exposed to the importance of lipids, and we should be. <\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/p>\n

\u2014
\n Bruce Cohen <\/p>\n

\u201cFlash forward some years,\u201d he says, and he found himself looking at, in a cortical region involved in fine-grained whisker sensation, 14 distinct lipizones not distinguishable by transcriptomics alone. \u201cYou cannot, simply by looking at gene expression, understand the story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new lipid map also reveals a \u201cshadow of connectivity,\u201d he says, because of the myelin sheaths of long-range neurons and the lipid footprint they leave. \u201cWe start to see basically the same lipidome, millimeters away, in different regions. The lipids let us see connectivity in ways that we were not [able to see before].\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference in lipids between male and female mice was less dramatic than that between mid-gestation pregnant females and nonpregnant females. As female brains remodel during pregnancy<\/a>, most lipizones are affected, with some changing size but not composition, and others changing composition but not size. The cortical regions most affected suggest that those lipid changes tune sensory circuits, perhaps to increase sensitivity to their pups. The enzymes that synthesize these lipids are controlled by master regulators that in turn receive signals from glucocorticoid receptors that sense stress hormones, showing how hormones could orchestrate this lipid tuning.<\/p>\n

Specific enzymes track with age-related lipid changes, too, Zhao and her team found. Five enzymes fit two of these three criteria: They remodel PUFA side chains, they are highly expressed in quiescent neural stem cells, or their expression significantly changes with age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brain mapping efforts, so far dominated by transcriptomics and connectomics, are putting a spotlight on lipids of late.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-642491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}