Lipidomic Analysis of Apoptotic Hela Cells Induced by Paclitaxel

Abstract Apoptosis has been shown to be accompanied by changes in cellular phospholipids. In this study, lipidomic strategy was applied to investigate the early changes in Hela cell phospholipid metabolism in response to paclitaxel-induced apoptosis. A total of 240 phospholipid species were profiled and 202 of them were quantified using the NPLC-ESI/MSn procedure. Principal component analysis and partial least squares combined with variable influence on projection were applied to find the potential biomarkers for discrimination between the control and paclitaxel-treated cells. Lysophosphatidylethanolamine and lysophosphatidylcholine species with strong decreasing trends after 6 h of treatment were identified as possible biomarkers for discrimination, which could be backed up by the decreased expression of cPLA2. In addition, some of phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylinositol, and phosphatidylcholine species with unsaturated fatty acid chains and phosphatidic acid species with saturated fatty acid chai...