Nutritional Lipidomics: Mapping Changes in the Lipidome Across Organ Systems in Response to Dietary Manipulations

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Cell membranes are made of lipids that can change according to the type of dietary fat a person eats. Understanding how diet affects these lipids is important to determine dietary requirements for specific fats such as omega-3 fatty acids, but also for understanding how fat impacts cell function in tissues such as the brain, heart, and liver. The lipids in cell membranes can determine physical characteristics of the membrane such as fluidity and permeability, but these lipids can also be a source of important bioactive signaling molecules. Lipidomics is a new field that relies on mass spectrometers and attempts to measure every lipid in a biological cell or system. For example, traditional fatty acid analyses identify 30-49 fatty acids in a sample, while lipidomics can identify hundreds to thousands of unique lipids. For this project, lipidomic methods will be developed to examine the effect of different diets, specifically diets with omega-3 fatty acids and diets high in fat. Rodent models will be used to control the amount of fat and the timing of the diet intervention so short-term and long-term effects can be measured. In addition, rodent models will allow the research team to examine numerous organ systems to see how diet effects types of tissues differently. Blood samples from humans with detailed information about their dietary habits will also be analyzed using lipidomics and the response compared to those observed in the rodent models. This project will help improve how we assess the impact of diet as it will allow very detailed and very specific changes in metabolism to be measured. The use of “nutritional lipidomics” to assess diet and lipid metabolism has the potential to change how nutrition research is studied and to greatly improve our ability to determine the nutritional requirements of individuals and populations in the future.