Changes in the structural and metabolic heterogeneity of phosphatidylcholines in the developing rat lung.

In the present study the developmental profiles of the structural and metabolic heterogeneity of rat lung phosphatidylcholine are presented. The individual molecular species of phosphatidylcholine at different stages of the developing rat lung were analyzed as diacylglycerol derivatives. The metabolic heterogeneity of rat lung phosphatidylcholine was also studied by incubation using lung slices with radioactive precursors. The results obtained were as follows: 1. A significant increase of lung phosphatidylcholine during perinatal development (up to 1 day after birth) was found to be largely due to the increase of dipalmitoyl species. The percentage of palmitoyl-palmitoleoyl species also increased from --4 to --1 day of gestation, while palmitoyl-oleoyl species were found to decrease during development. Other molecular species showed no significant changes. 2. The incorporation of [1-14C]palmitoyl lysophosphatidylcholine into saturated phosphatidylcholine was relatively low at the earlier stage of fetal development, but it increased significantly in the last stage and reached its maximum at one day prior to birth and one day prior to the marked accumulation of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine occurring in the lung. In contrast, the incorporation of [3H]glycerol into saturated phosphatidylcholine remained, without showing a marked alteration during development. These results suggest that the lysophosphatidylcholine pathway which is mainly attributed to transacylation mechanism between 2 molecules of lysophosphatidylcholine may contribute to the marked production of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine in the lung in the last stage of gestation.