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Brain lipids are organized into zones — and reorganized during pregnancy

Nature作者：Evan Macosko2026年9月23日正文已收录本站
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A map of fats across the whole mouse brain reveals a spatial architecture that differs from that seen in gene-expression and protein atlases.

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  1. Evan Macosko

    1. Evan Macosko is in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA.

When the pioneering German–British neurochemist Johann Thudichum generated the first catalogue of brain lipids more than a century ago, one molecular fraction baffled him so much that he named it sphingosine, after the enigmatic ancient Sphinx1. A century and a half later, the brain’s fats have retained much of that mystery. Comprising half of its dry weight, lipids are perhaps the brain’s most defining compositional feature. Their most famous role is forming the insulating myelin wrapping that enables efficient electrical conduction along neuronal projections called axons. But beyond this, a broader conceptual understanding of brain lipids is still in its infancy. How the vast diversity of brain lipids is spatially organized, and why the brain requires such immense biochemical variety, remains a big puzzle — one that Bassini et al.2 begin to address in their paper in Nature.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02772-2

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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