A team at EPFL has produced a three-dimensional atlas charting the lipid chemistry of the mouse brain, region by region. Lipids make up much of the brain's physical substance: they form the membranes of neurons, they wrap nerve fibers in myelin, and they take part in the signalling between brain cells. Despite that, they have been mapped far less thoroughly than genes or proteins.
The reason is technical. Standard imaging methods struggle to tell one lipid molecule from another, so researchers have had to work with what Giovanni D'Angelo, professor and Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Foundation Chair in Nutrition and Metabolism at EPFL, describes as a blurry picture of how lipid composition shifts across different parts of the brain.
That blurriness has consequences for disease research. Changes in brain lipids are increasingly being linked to conditions ranging from depression to Alzheimer's disease, and it is hard to interpret an abnormal lipid signal without knowing what normal looks like in that specific region. A detailed reference map gives that baseline.
The work was done in mice, so it describes the chemistry of a rodent brain rather than a human one. Its immediate value is as a foundation: a resource other laboratories can measure their findings against when they look for lipid changes tied to neurodegeneration.