5 Key Takeaways

• 1

  Researchers used MALDI-MSI to map lipids at 7.2 million locations across 109 brain sections from 11 adult mice.

• 2

  After quality checks and annotation, analyses focused on 172 nonredundant lipids and identified 539 lipid-defined brain regions, or lipizones.

• 3

  The atlas showed lipid patterns distinguishing grey and white matter, cortical layers, ventricular structures, and other anatomical regions.

• 4

  Pregnancy was associated with broader lipid changes than differences between male and nonpregnant female mice, including white matter and cortical layer 4 changes.

• 5

  The atlas may aid mouse disease research, but it does not establish diagnostic biomarkers, and its findings require validation in human tissue and clinical samples.