Mitochondria-specific photoactivation to monitor local sphingosine metabolism and function
- University of Geneva, Switzerland
- Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract
Photoactivation ('uncaging') is a powerful approach for releasing bioactive small-molecules in living cells. Current uncaging methods are limited by the random distribution of caged molecules within cells. We have developed a mitochondria-specific photoactivation method, which permitted us to release free sphingosine inside mitochondria and thereafter monitor local sphingosine metabolism by lipidomics. Our results indicate that sphingosine was quickly phosphorylated into sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) driven by sphingosine kinases. In time-course studies, the mitochondria-specific uncaged sphingosine demonstrated distinct metabolic patterns compared to globally-released sphingosine, and did not induce calcium spikes. Our data provide direct evidence that sphingolipid metabolism and signaling are highly dependent on the subcellular location and opens up new possibilities to study the effects of lipid localization on signaling and metabolic fate.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Swiss National Science Foundation (CRSII3-154405)
- Howard Riezman
National Centre for Competence in Research in Chemical Biology (51NF40-160589)
- Nicolas Winssinger
- Howard Riezman
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Takeshi Harayama
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were performed according to guidelines provided by the Animal Welfare Act and Animal welfare ordinance, the Rectors' Conference of the Swiss Universities (CRUS) policy and the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences / Swiss Academy of Sciences' Ethical Principles and Guidelines for Experiments on Animals, and were approved by the Geneva Cantonal Veterinary Authority (authorization number: 28038/GE86/16).
Copyright
© 2018, Feng et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Mitochondria-specific photoactivation to monitor local sphingosine metabolism and function
eLife 7:e34555.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34555
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