Browsing by Subject "oxysterol"

Oxysterols and vitamin D related compounds are found to be biologically active in brain. They might be involved in different psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. These compounds have traditionally been analysed from tissues using somewhat laborious and time-consuming gas chromatograpy and liquid chromatography mass spectrometric methods. To the side of these methods ambient desorption ionization methods have been developed. The advantage of these methods is rapid and easy operation. Usually minimal or no sample pretreatment is required. In addition these methods can be applied to imaging of for example tissues. The aim of this work was to study if it is possible to detect certain oxysterols and vitamin D related compounds from rat brain tissue samples with desorption atmospheric pressure photoionization (DAPPI). The compounds chosen to this study were cholesterol, vitamin D3, 25-hydroxyvitamin D3, 7-dehydrocholesterol, desmosterol and 7-ketocholesterol. DAPPI is especially suitable for efficient ionization of this kind of neutral and non-polar compounds. Detected MS and MSn spectras of the brain tissue samples were compared to those obtained from standard compounds. As a result we could not detect vitamin D3, 25-hydroxyvitamin D3, 7-dehydrocholesterol, desmosterol from rat brain samples with DAPPI. Excluding vitamin D3 it is possible that those other analytes are present at the spectras of brain samples but there is some other compound with same mass which makes the reliable identification of studied compounds impossible. 7-ketocholesterol and cholesterol were the only compunds we detected from brain tissue sections. 7-ketocholesterol can be formed via auto-oxidation in samples containing excess amount of cholesterol. According to this study it is impossible to say if the detected 7-ketocholesterol is formed endogenously or during sample preparation and analysis.