Use of 1H and 31P HRMAS to evaluate the relationship between quantitative alterations in metabolite concentrations and tissue features in human brain tumour biopsies

Quantitative multinuclear high-resolution magic angle spinning was performed in order to determine the tissue pH values of and the absolute metabolite concentrations in 33 samples of human brain tumour tissue. Metabolite concentrations were quantified by 1D H-1 and P-31 HRMAS using the electronic reference to in vivo concentrations (ERETIC) synthetic signal. H-1-H-1 homonuclear and H-1-P-31 heteronuclear correlation experiments enabled the direct assessment of the H-1-P-31 spin systems for signals that suffered from overlapping in the 1D H-1 spectra, and linked the information present in the 1D H-1 and P-31 spectra. Afterwards, the main histological features were determined, and high heterogeneity in the tumour content, necrotic content and nonaffected tissue content was observed. The metabolite profiles obtained by HRMAS showed characteristics typical of tumour tissues: rather low levels of energetic molecules and increased concentrations of protective metabolites. Nevertheless, these characteristics were more strongly correlated with the total amount of living tissue than with the tumour cell contents of the samples alone, which could indicate that the sampling conditions make a significant contribution aside from the effect of tumour development in vivo. The use of methylene diphosphonic acid as a chemical shift and concentration reference for the P-31 HRMAS spectra of tissues presented important drawbacks due to its interaction with the tissue. Moreover, the pH data obtained from P-31 HRMAS enabled us to establish a correlation between the pH and the distance between the N(CH3)(3) signals of phosphocholine and choline in H-1 spectra of the tissue in these tumour samples.