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Published on: August 8, 2019
Organization and evolution of brain lipidome revealed by large-scale analysis of human, chimpanzee, macaque, and
Katarzyna Bozek1, Yuning Wei2, Zheng Yan2
1CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Abstract:
Lipids are prominent components of the nervous system. Here we performed a large-scale mass spectrometry-based analysis of the lipid composition of three brain regions as well as kidney and skeletal muscle of humans, chimpanzees, rhesus macaques, and mice. The human brain shows the most distinct lipid composition: 76% of 5,713 lipid compounds examined in our study are either enriched or depleted in the human brain. Concentration levels of lipids enriched in the brain evolve approximately four times faster among primates compared with lipids characteristic of non-neural tissues and show further acceleration of change in human neocortical regions but not in the cerebellum. Human-specific concentration changes are supported by human-specific expression changes for corresponding enzymes. These results provide the first insights into the role of lipids in human brain evolution.
