The Neurolipid Atlas: a lipidomics resource for neurodegenerative diseases

Lipid alterations in the brain have been implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases. To facilitate comparative lipidomic research across brain diseases here we establish a data common named the Neurolipid Atlas, that we have pre-populated with isogenic induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived lipidomics data for different brain diseases. Additionally, the resource contains lipidomics data of human and mouse brain tissue. Leveraging multiple datasets, we demonstrate that iPSC-derived neurons, microglia, and astrocytes exhibit distinct lipid profiles that recapitulate in vivo lipotypes. Notably, the AD risk gene ApoE4 drives cholesterol ester (CE) accumulation specifically in human astrocytes, and we also observe CE accumulation in whole human AD brain lipidomics. Multi-omics interrogation of iPSC-derived astrocytes revealed that altered cholesterol metabolism plays a major role in astrocyte interferon-dependent pathways such as the immunoproteasome and major histocompatibility complex class I antigen presentation. Our data commons, available at neurolipidatlas.com, and allows for data deposition by the community and provides a user-friendly tool and knowledge base for a better understanding of lipid dyshomeostasis in neurodegenerative diseases. Overall design: We performed bulk RNA sequencing on an isogenic pair of iPSC-derived ApoE3/3 and ApoE4/4 astrocytes.