Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Pathophysiol. May 15, 2016; 7(2): 235-241
Published online May 15, 2016. doi: 10.4291/wjgp.v7.i2.235
Visualization of sphingolipids and phospholipids in the fundic gland mucosa of human stomach using imaging mass spectrometry
Nobuya Kurabe, Hisaki Igarashi, Ippei Ohnishi, Shogo Tajima, Yusuke Inoue, Yoshihiko Takahashi, Mitsutoshi Setou, Haruhiko Sugimura
Nobuya Kurabe, Hisaki Igarashi, Ippei Ohnishi, Yusuke Inoue, Yoshihiko Takahashi, Haruhiko Sugimura, Department of Tumor Pathology, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Shizuoka 431-3192, Japan
Ippei Ohnishi, Division of Pathology, Iwata City Hospital, Shizuoka 438-8550, Japan
Shogo Tajima, Department of Pathology, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Yusuke Inoue, Second Division, Department of Internal Medicine, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Shizuoka 431-3192, Japan
Mitsutoshi Setou, Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Shizuoka 431-3192, Japan
Author contributions: Kurabe N, Igarashi H, Ohnishi I, Tajima S, Inoue Y, Setou M and Sugimura H substantially contributed to the conception and design of the study and acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; all authors drafted the manuscript, made critical revisions related to the intellectual content of the manuscript, and approved the final version of the manuscript to be publishied.
Institutional review board statement: All the gastric tissue specimens were residual tissues from surgical procedures. The patients gave informed consent for research use, provided that the study was conducted anonymously.
Conflict-of-interest statement: To the best of our knowledge, no conflict of interest exists.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Haruhiko Sugimura, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Tumor Pathology, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, 1-20-1 Handayama, Higashi-Ku, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka 431-3192, Japan. hsugimur@hama-med.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-53-4352220 Fax: +81-53-4352225
Received: December 10, 2015
Peer-review started: December 11, 2015
First decision: January 13, 2016
Revised: January 21, 2016
Accepted: March 1, 2016
Article in press: March 2, 2016
Published online: May 15, 2016
Core Tip

Core tip: Imaging mass spectrometry (MS) is a useful tool to survey the distribution of biomolecules in surgical specimens. Here we used the imaging MS apparatus named iMScope to identify the dominant molecules present in the human gastric mucosa near the fundic glands. Three major molecules with m/z 725.5, 780.5, and 782.5 detected in the gastric mucosa were identified as sphingomyelin (d18:1/16:0), phosphatidylcholine (PC) (16:0/18:2), and PC (16:0/18:1), respectively.