Lipids constitute over 50% of the dry weight of the mammalian brain, serving as structural cornerstones of synaptic membranes and dynamic regulators of cell signaling, axonal integrity, and synaptic plasticity [5]. Over the past ten years, our research group has focused on utilizing advanced Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MALDI-MSI) to map the spatial organization of the brain lipidome in both pathological and physiological states [3, 6].

This research portfolio compiles translational lipidomic and pathomechanical results obtained across several clinical models. These include defining the irreversible molecular impacts of diet-induced obesity on the brain, mapping synaptic phospholipid rescue in the Alzheimer’s disease hippocampus under pharmacological Stearoyl-CoA Desaturase (SCD) inhibition, characterizing lipid remodeling in response to diverse nutritional interventions, establishing striatal and substantia nigra lipid alterations in a unilateral 6-OHDA Parkinson’s disease model, and characterizing lipid remodeling and inflammation-resolution biology within infarcted myocardial tissues. This body of work underscores the power of MALDI-MSI as a label-free molecular histology tool to localize and identify critical lipid pathomechanisms directly in tissue sections.