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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Assessment of lipid profile stability in postmortem samples for the development of intraoperative diagnostic methods
1 Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (National Research University), Dolgoprudny, Russia
2 Burnasyan Federal Medical Biophysical Center, Moscow, Russia
3 V. L. Talrose Institute for Energy Problems of Chemical Physics, Moscow, Russia
Correspondence should be addressed: Ekaterina V. Parochkina
Pervomaiskaya, 5, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Russia; ude.hcetsyhp@ve.aniramahs
Funding: the study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation within the framework of research project No. 23-69-10035.
Author contribution: Parochkina EV — study conceptualization, experiment, data analysis, article authoring; Rumiantseva AA, Semyonova DK, Stupnikova GS — experiment; Bormotov DS — experiment, data analysis; Temnov AA — study conceptualization, experiment; Zavorotnyuk DS — data analysis; Bocharov KV — fundraising, research management.
Compliance with ethical standards: the study was approved by the Commission for the Control of the maintenance and use of laboratory animals of the Preclinical Research Center of the Central Research Laboratory, Siberian State Medical University of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (Minutes No. 1 of October 13, 2023). The study complied with Federal Law No. 61-FZ "On the Circulation of Medicines" and the 2023 Eurasian Economic Commission Board Guidelines for Working with Laboratory (Experimental) Animals During Preclinical (Non-clinical) Studies. The sanitary and epidemiological norms stipulated in SanPiN 3.3686-21 "Sanitary and epidemiological requirements for the prevention of infectious diseases" have been observed.
Intraoperative determination of tumor boundaries reduces the volume of resected tissue while ensuring complete removal of malignant tissue without increasing the risk of recurrence. The existing approaches, including intraoperative histology or tomography, are highly effective, but they extend the time of the surgery. Therefore, real-time analysis methods are a particularly interesting avenue. One such solution involves building a profile using ambient ionization mass spectrometry. The molecular profile of the examined tissue is compared with a reference database of healthy and pathologically altered tissues. For many human organs, samples for this database can only be obtained from autopsy material. However, due to the unavoidable gap between the moment of death and sample collection, tissue degradation can change the picture of pathological process. This experimental quantitative study investigated the stability of polar lipid profiles in the liver and brain tissues of healthy BALB/c mice (n = 23) during the early postmortem period (0–72 hours). It has been shown that lysolipids and free fatty acids correlate with the postmortem interval (r > 0.6 overall; r = 0.75 for FA 20:4 and FA 22:6); therefore, they cannot be used as molecular markers in diagnostic models based on autopsy samples. At the same time, the profile of phospholipids in tissue cell membranes remains largely unchanged in the early postmortem period, which preserves their value as biomarkers detectable in both biopsy and autopsy specimens.
Keywords: mass spectrometry, lipids, molecular diagnostics, oncometabolites, molecular profiling, postmortem stability, intraoperative diagnostics