Lipid N-formylation Occurs During Fixation with Formalin

Human tissues and organs can be preserved intact by fixation with formalin for the future analysis of biomolecules of interest. With the advances in high-throughput methods, numerous protocols have been developed and optimized to attain the most pathophysiological information out of biomolecules, including RNA and proteins, in formalin-fixed samples. However, there is no systematic study to examine the effects of formalin fixation on the lipidome of biological samples in a global fashion. In this study, we conducted a mass spectrometry-based analysis to survey the alteration in the lipidome of mice brains by fixation methods. A total of 308 lipids were quantitatively measured using triple quadrupole mass spectrometry. We found that most were unchanged after formalin fixation except for a few lipid classes such as phosphatidylethanolamine.