ABSTRACT

Introduction

We present lipidomic studies that have utilized cadaveric biological samples, including tissues and bodily fluids (excluding blood or serum). Analyses of lipids from cadaveric-derived tissues play vital roles in many different fields, such as in anthropogeny to understand food habits of ancient people, in forensics for postmortem analyses, and in biomedical research to study human diseases.

Areas covered

The goal of the review is to demonstrate how cadavers can be utilized for study of lipidome to get biological insight in different fields. Several important considerations need to be made when analyzing lipids from cadaver samples. For example, what important postmortem changes occur due to environmental or other intrinsic factors that introduce deviations in the observed differences versus true differences? Do these factors affect distinct classes of lipids differently? How do we arrive at a reasonable level of certainty that the observed differences are truly biological rather than artifacts of sample collection, changes during transportation, or variations in analytical procedures? These are pressing questions that need to be addressed when performing lipidomics investigations utilizing postmortem tissues, which inherently presents hurdles and unknowns beginning with harvesting methods, transportation logistics, and at analytical techniques. In our review, we have purposefully omitted blood and serum studies since they pose greater challenges in this regard. Several studies have been carried out with cadaveric tissues and fluids that support the successful use of cases of these samples; however, many control studies are still necessary to provide insight into full potential of the cadaveric tissue and fluid resources. Most importantly, additional control studies will allow us to gain important insights into the opportunities lipidomics presents for biomedical studies of complex human disease and disorders. Another goal of the review is to generate awareness about limitations and pitfalls of use of cadaver materials for study of lipidome.

Expert Opinion

We comment on the current state of lipidomics studies that utilize cadaveric tissues, provide a few pertinent examples, and discuss perspectives on both future technological directions and the applications they will enable.

中文翻译：

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利用尸体衍生的生物样品的脂质组学概述

摘要

介绍

我们提出了利用尸体生物样本的脂质组学研究，包括组织和体液（不包括血液或血清）。来自尸体组织的脂质分析在许多不同领域发挥着至关重要的作用，例如在人类学中了解古代人的饮食习惯、在法医学中进行死后分析以及在生物医学研究中研究人类疾病。

涵盖的领域

这篇综述的目的是展示如何利用尸体研究脂质组以获得不同领域的生物学见解。在分析尸体样本中的脂质时，需要考虑几个重要的因素。例如，由于环境或其他内在因素导致观察到的差异与真实差异发生偏差，会发生哪些重要的事后变化？这些因素是否会以不同的方式影响不同类别的脂质？我们如何达到合理的确定水平，即观察到的差异是真正的生物学差异，而不是样本采集的伪影、运输过程中的变化或分析程序的变化？这些是利用死后组织进行脂质组学研究时需要解决的紧迫问题，从收获方法、运输物流和分析技术开始，它固有地提出了障碍和未知数。在我们的审查中，我们故意省略了血液和血清研究，因为它们在这方面提出了更大的挑战。已经对尸体组织和体液进行了几项研究，这些研究支持成功使用这些样本的病例；然而，仍然需要许多对照研究来深入了解尸体组织和体液资源的全部潜力。最重要的是，额外的对照研究将使我们能够深入了解脂质组学为复杂人类疾病和紊乱的生物医学研究提供的机会。审查的另一个目标是提高人们对使用尸体材料研究脂质组的局限性和缺陷的认识。

专家意见

我们评论了利用尸体组织的脂质组学研究的现状，提供了一些相关的例子，并讨论了对未来技术方向和它们将实现的应用的看法。