Chen Kevin, Baluya Dodge, Tosun Mehmet, Li Feng, Maletic-Savatic Mirjana
Department of Biosciences, Rice University, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Metabolites. 2019 Jul 10;9(7):135. doi: 10.3390/metabo9070135.
Neurodegenerative diseases are prevalent and devastating. While extensive research has been done over the past decades, we are still far from comprehensively understanding what causes neurodegeneration and how we can prevent it or reverse it. Recently, systems biology approaches have led to a holistic examination of the interactions between genome, metabolome, and the environment, in order to shed new light on neurodegenerative pathogenesis. One of the new technologies that has emerged to facilitate such studies is imaging mass spectrometry (IMS). With its ability to map a wide range of small molecules with high spatial resolution, coupled with the ability to quantify them at once, without the need for a priori labeling, IMS has taken center stage in current research efforts in elucidating the role of the metabolome in driving neurodegeneration. IMS has already proven to be effective in investigating the lipidome and the proteome of various neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Here, we review the IMS platform for capturing biological snapshots of the metabolic state to shed more light on the molecular mechanisms of the diseased brain.
神经退行性疾病普遍存在且具有破坏性。尽管在过去几十年里已经进行了广泛的研究，但我们距离全面了解神经退行性变的病因以及如何预防或逆转它仍有很大差距。最近，系统生物学方法促使人们对基因组、代谢组和环境之间的相互作用进行全面研究，以便为神经退行性疾病的发病机制提供新的见解。为促进此类研究而出现的一项新技术是成像质谱（IMS）。凭借其能够以高空间分辨率绘制多种小分子图谱的能力，以及无需事先标记即可一次性对其进行定量的能力，IMS在当前阐明代谢组在驱动神经退行性变中作用的研究工作中占据了核心地位。IMS已被证明在研究各种神经退行性疾病（如阿尔茨海默病、帕金森病、亨廷顿病、多发性硬化症和肌萎缩侧索硬化症）的脂质组和蛋白质组方面是有效的。在此，我们综述了用于捕捉代谢状态生物快照的IMS平台，以更深入地了解患病大脑的分子机制。
