Biological relevance of fatty acyl heterogeneity to the neural membrane dynamics of Rhesus macaques during normative aging

// Sin Man Lam 1 , Gek Huey Chua 1 , Xiao-Jiang Li 1 , Bing Su 2 and Guanghou Shui 1 1 State Key Laboratory of Molecular Developmental Biology, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 2 State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, China Correspondence to: Guanghou Shui, email: // Keywords : aging, lipidomics, Rhesus macaques, docosahexaenoic acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, Gerotarget Received : June 07, 2016 Accepted : July 30, 2016 Published : August 10, 2016 Abstract Lipidomic analyses of the frontal cortex of Rhesus macaques across three selected age groups (young, sexually-mature, old) revealed that docosahexaenoic acids (DHAs) displayed notable and unique accretions in sexually-mature macaques for all phospholipid classes examined, which were not observable in all remaining polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) investigated. On the other hand, arachidonic acid (ARA) exhibited sharp attritions in the membrane lipidomes of sexually-mature macaques, a decline which was attenuated only for cardiolipins (CLs). DHA enrichment in phospholipids was lost in old macaques, with accompanying augmentations in very-long-chain sphingomyelins (VLC-SMs). Age-dependent alterations in membrane lipidomes point to a possibly complex temporal interplay between DHA-enriched membrane microdomains and SM-/cholesterol-rich rafts in neural membranes during normative aging. Lipid co-regulation data revealed an increasingly intense degree of co-regulation between membrane lipid classes with age, and suggest that reduction in CLs during normative brain aging may prompt alternative membrane lipid synthetic pathways driven by a compromised energy availability in the aging brain.