Microglia are the confined immune cells of the central nervous system (CNS). In response to injury or infection, microglia readily become activated and release proinflammatory mediators that are believed to contribute to microglia-mediated neurodegeneration. In the present study, inflammation was induced in the immortalized murine microglial cell line BV-2 by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) treatment. We firstly performed phosphoproteomics analysis and phosphoinositide lipidomics analysis with LPS activated microglia in order to compare phosphorylation patterns in active and inactive microglia and to detect the pattern of changes in phosphoinositide regulation upon activation of microglia. Mass spectrometry analysis of the phosphoproteome of the LPS treatment group compared to that of the untreated control group revealed a notable increase in the diversity of cellular phosphorylation upon LPS treatment. Additionally, a lipidomics analysis detected significant increases in the amounts of phosphoinositide species in the LPS treatment. This investigation could provide an insight for understanding molecular mechanisms underlying microglia-mediated neurodegenerative diseases.

The goal of this study is to find an experimental condition which enables us to perform enzymatic studies on the cellular behavior of PTEN (phosphatase and tensine homolog) through identification of molecular species of phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphates and their quantitative analysis in a mammalian cell line using mass spectrometry. We initially exployed a two-step extraction process using HCl for extraction of phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphates from two mammalian cell lines and further analyzed the extracted phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphates using tandem mass spectrometry for the identification of them. We finally quantified the concentration of phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphates using internal standard calibration. From these observation, we found that HEK 293-T cells is a good model to examine the enzymatic behavior of PTEN in a cell, and the minimum amount of phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphates is more than 50 pmol for quantification in a mass spectrometer. These results suggest that the well-optimized experimental conditions are required for the investigation of the cellular PTEN in terms of the catalytic mechanism and further for the detailed identification of cellular substrates.