Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Medicine and Engineering, University of Yamanashi, Chuo, Yamanashi 409-3898, Japan.
Anal Biochem. 2011 Oct 15;417(2):195-201. doi: 10.1016/j.ab.2011.06.020. Epub 2011 Jun 22.
Probe electrospray ionization (PESI) is one of the most promising methods in biochemical analysis because it enables us to analyze biological samples very quickly without any special pretreatment. Moreover, due to the small size of the needle tip, this method has advantages such as low invasiveness to the samples, making it possible to analyze the biological profiles of organs or tissues in living animal in situ. In this study, we performed a real-time analysis of living mice that delineates the differences in lipid composition of hepatocytes between normal and steatotic mice. In steatotic mice, the number of peaks and the ion abundance for triacylglycerols were much higher compared with those of control mice. All mice used in this study tolerated the procedure well and survived for more than a month until sacrificed for further analysis. To test a potential for medical diagnosis, human tumor tissues were also measured and we obtained discriminative results judged as useful for diagnostics. These results pave the way into the application of PESI to the in vivo analysis of biological molecules.
探针电喷雾离子化（PESI）是生化分析中最有前途的方法之一，因为它使我们能够在无需任何特殊预处理的情况下非常快速地分析生物样本。此外，由于针尖尺寸很小，这种方法具有低侵入性的优点，使我们有可能原位分析活体内器官或组织的生物特征。在这项研究中，我们对活体小鼠进行了实时分析，描绘了正常和脂肪变性小鼠肝细胞中脂质组成的差异。与对照组相比，脂肪变性小鼠的三酰基甘油峰数和离子丰度要高得多。本研究中使用的所有小鼠均耐受该过程，并存活超过一个月，直到被处死以进行进一步分析。为了测试其在医学诊断中的潜在应用，我们还测量了人肿瘤组织，并获得了可判断为对诊断有用的区分性结果。这些结果为将 PESI 应用于生物分子的活体分析铺平了道路。
