Tailored Polymer-Based Selective Extraction of Lipid Mediators from Biological Samples

Yohannes Abere Ambaw; Sandra Rinne Dahl; Yan Chen; Tyge Greibrokk; Elsa Lundanes; Issam Lazraq; Sudhirkumar Shinde; Jayashree Selvalatchmanan; Markus R Wenk; Börje Sellergren; Federico Torta

doi:10.3390/metabo11080539

Tailored Polymer-Based Selective Extraction of Lipid Mediators from Biological Samples

Metabolites. 2021 Aug 13;11(8):539. doi: 10.3390/metabo11080539.

Authors

Yohannes Abere Ambaw^{1

2

3}, Sandra Rinne Dahl^{4

5}, Yan Chen⁴, Tyge Greibrokk⁴, Elsa Lundanes⁴, Issam Lazraq⁶, Sudhirkumar Shinde^{6

7}, Jayashree Selvalatchmanan^{1

2}, Markus R Wenk^{1

2}, Börje Sellergren⁶, Federico Torta^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Precision Medicine Translational Research Programme and Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore.
² SLING, Singapore Lipidomics Incubator, Life Sciences Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore.
³ Department of Molecular Metabolism, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, University of Oslo, 0315 Oslo, Norway.
⁵ Hormone Laboratory, Department of Medical Biochemistry, Oslo University Hospital, 0424 Oslo, Norway.
⁶ Department of Biomedical Sciences, Biofilms Research Center for Biointerfaces, Faculty of Health and Society, Malmö University, 21119 Malmö, Sweden.
⁷ School of Consciousness, Dr Vishwanath Karad Maharashtra Institute of Technology-World Peace University, Kothrud, Pune 411038, Maharashtra, India.

Abstract

Lipid mediators, small molecules involved in regulating inflammation and its resolution, are a class of lipids of wide interest as their levels in blood and tissues may be used to monitor health and disease states or the effect of new treatments. These molecules are present at low levels in biological samples, and an enrichment step is often needed for their detection. We describe a rapid and selective method that uses new low-cost molecularly imprinted (MIP) and non-imprinted (NIP) polymeric sorbents for the extraction of lipid mediators from plasma and tissue samples. The extraction process was carried out in solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridges, manually packed with the sorbents. After extraction, lipid mediators were quantified by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MSMS). Various parameters affecting the extraction efficiency were evaluated to achieve optimal recovery and to reduce non-specific interactions. Preliminary tests showed that MIPs, designed using the prostaglandin biosynthetic precursor arachidonic acid, could effectively enrich prostaglandins and structurally related molecules. However, for other lipid mediators, MIP and NIP displayed comparable recoveries. Under optimized conditions, the recoveries of synthetic standards ranged from 62% to 100%. This new extraction method was applied to the determination of the lipid mediators concentration in human plasma and mouse tissues and compared to other methods based on commercially available cartridges. In general, the methods showed comparable performances. In terms of structural specificity, our newly synthesized materials accomplished better retention of prostaglandins (PGs), hydroxydocosahexaenoic acid (HDoHE), HEPE, hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acids (HETE), hydroxyeicosatrienoic acid (HETrE), and polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) compounds, while the commercially available Strata-X showed a higher recovery for dihydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (diHETrEs). In summary, our results suggest that this new material can be successfully implemented for the extraction of lipid mediators from biological samples.

Keywords: lipid mediators; molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP); non-imprinted polymer (NIP); solid-phase extraction (SPE); strata-X.