Increased expression of phosphatidylcholine (16:0/18:1) and (16:0/18:2) in thyroid papillary cancer

A good prognosis can be expected for most, but not all, cases of thyroid papillary cancer. Numerous molecular studies have demonstrated beneficial treatment and prognostic factors in various molecular markers. Whereas most previous reports have focused on genomics and proteomics, few have focused on lipidomics. With the advent of mass spectrometry (MS), it has become possible to identify many types of molecules, and this analytical tool has become critical in the field of omics. Recently, imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) was developed. After a simple pretreatment process, IMS can be used to examine tissue sections on glass slides with location information. Here, we conducted an IMS analysis of seven cases of thyroid papillary cancer by comparison of cancerous with normal tissues, focusing on the distribution of phospholipids. We identified that phosphatidylcholine (16:0/18:1) and (16:0/18:2) and sphingomyelin (d18:0/16:1) are significantly higher in thyroid papillary cancer than in normal thyroid tissue as determined by tandem mass (MS/MS) analysis. These distributional differences may be associated with the biological behavior of thyroid papillary cancer.