Lipidomics: A Fresh Perspective on Life
About 70% of the metabolites in plasma are lipids, and lipid metabolism is the first category of metabolism in animals and plants. With the extensive application of mass spectrometry, the development of lipidomics has been greatly accelerated, and lipidomics has become one of the most active research fields in metabolomics. Researchers from the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and Cancer Hospital and Research Institute have discovered a key signaling pathway that cancer cells use to generate lipids, which supports cell division and rapid tumor growth by integrating carcinogenic signals, fuel utilization, and lipid synthesis. There are thousands of lipids in the body, and their metabolism intertwines through many signaling pathways and networks, affecting normal life activities and disease occurrence and development.
Lipidomics can screen biomarkers for disease diagnosis, staging/classification, and prognosis. It also has achievements in drug therapy, such as the development of polyketone antimicrobial, antiparasitic, and antitumor drugs. Combined with other omics, it can more comprehensively explain the changes and correlations of diseases at various levels. Lipidomics is now widely used in the study of various clinical diseases, such as nervous, digestive, cardiovascular, endocrine, immune system diseases, and tumors, in particular.
The main contents of lipidomics research
Analysis and identification of lipids and their metabolites; function and metabolic regulation of lipids, including key genes/proteins/enzymes; lipid metabolic pathways and networks. In particular, breakthrough progress is expected to be made inlipidomics research in the next few years in the following three aspects:
- Massive, high-precision analysis and identification of body fluid lipid metabolites and their relationships with important diseases.
- The dynamic changes of cell and regional lipid composition and their relationship with cell dysfunction.
- The metabolic regulation of cholesterol and its oxidized modification and its relationship with related metabolic disorders.
- The metabolic regulation of fatty acids and their relationship with relevant metabolic disorders.
- The relationship between lipid metabolism and life-essential basic membrane structures.
- The basis for the development of relevant drugs by metabolites and metabolic pathways.
Establishment of standards for extraction and separation, development of software and databases, in-depth research on metabolic pathways and networks, and establishment and improvement of related bioinformatics technology systems are three issues that urgently need to be resolved.
Many mathematical models are used for bioinformatics analysis of lipidomics and metabolomics
In recent years, a new patented "extensively targeted metabolome" technology has emerged, which integrates the advantages of non-targeted and targeted metabolite detection technologies, realizing high throughput, high sensitivity and wide coverage of targeted metabolite detection, qualitative and quantitative detection of 600+ metabolites in biological samples at one time, allowing more It can detect more compounds and biomarkers more easily, covering more than 95% of the pathway in KEGG and making functional studies easier. Some researchers have applied this technology to lipidomics and developed "broadly targeted lipidomics", which can consistently detect thousands of lipids at one time, providing a new method to study the important functions of lipids in the organism.
