The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has been widely used as a model vertebrate system to study lipid metabolism, the roles of lipids in diseases, and lipid dynamics in embryonic development. Here, we applied high-spatial resolution matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI)-mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) to map and visualize the three-dimensional spatial distribution of phospholipid classes, phosphatidylcholine (PC), phosphatidylethanolamines (PE), and phosphatidylinositol (PI), in newly fertilized individual zebrafish embryos. This is the first time MALDI-MSI has been applied for three dimensional chemical imaging of a single cell. PC molecular species are present inside the yolk in addition to the blastodisc, while PE and PI species are mostly absent in the yolk. Two-dimensional MSI was also studied for embryos at different cell stages (1-, 2-, 4-, 8-, and 16-cell stage) to investigate the localization changes of some lipids at various cell developmental stages. Four different normalization approaches were compared to find reliable relative quantification in 2D- and 3D- MALDI MSI data sets.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/youngjin-lee/30/
This article is published as Dueñas, Maria Emilia, Jeffrey J. Essner, and Young Jin Lee. "3D MALDI Mass Spectrometry Imaging of a Single Cell: Spatial Mapping of Lipids in the Embryonic Development of Zebrafish." Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 14946. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-14949-x. Posted with permission.