Due to the high association of glutathione metabolism perturbation with a variety of disease states, there is a dire need for analytical techniques to study glutathione kinetics. Additionally, the elucidation of microenvironmental effects on changes in glutathione metabolism would significantly improve our understanding of the role of glutathione in disease. We therefore present a study combining a multiple infusion start time protocol, stable isotope labeling technology, infrared matrix-assisted laser desorption electrospray ionization, and high-resolution accurate mass-mass spectrometry imaging to study spatial changes in glutathione kinetics across in sectioned mouse liver tissues. After injecting a mouse with the isotopologues [2-13C,15N]-glycine, [1,2-13C2]-glycine, and [1,2-13C2,15N]-glycine at three different time points, we were able to fully resolve and spatially map their metabolism into three isotopologues of glutathione and calculate their isotopic enrichment in glutathione. We created a tool in the open-source mass spectrometry imaging software MSiReader to accurately compute the percent isotope enrichment (PIE) of these labels in glutathione and visualize them in heat-maps of the tissue sections. In areas of high flux, we found that each label enriched an approximate median of 1.6%, 1.8%, and 1.5%, respectively, of the glutathione product pool measured in each voxel. This method may be adapted to study the heterogeneity of glutathione flux in diseased versus healthy tissues.
Keywords: IR-MALDESI; glutathione; kinetic metabolism; mass spectrometry imaging; stable isotope labeling.