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

细胞膜是由脂质构成的，脂质可以根据一个人摄入的膳食脂肪类型而改变。了解饮食如何影响这些脂质对于确定特定脂肪（如ω -3脂肪酸）的饮食需求非常重要，而且对于了解脂肪如何影响大脑、心脏和肝脏等组织中的细胞功能也很重要。细胞膜中的脂质可以决定细胞膜的物理特性，如流动性和渗透性，但这些脂质也可以是重要的生物活性信号分子的来源。脂质组学是一个新的领域，它依赖于质谱仪，并试图测量生物细胞或系统中的每一种脂质。例如，传统的脂肪酸分析在样品中识别30-49种脂肪酸，而脂质组学可以识别数百到数千种独特的脂质。在这个项目中，脂质组学方法将被开发出来，以检查不同饮食的影响，特别是含有omega-3脂肪酸的饮食和高脂肪饮食。啮齿类动物模型将用于控制脂肪量和饮食干预的时间，以便测量短期和长期影响。此外，啮齿动物模型将使研究小组能够检查许多器官系统，以了解饮食对不同类型组织的影响。研究人员还将使用脂质组学分析含有饮食习惯详细信息的人类血液样本，并将其与在啮齿动物模型中观察到的反应进行比较。这个项目将有助于改善我们评估饮食影响的方式，因为它将允许非常详细和非常具体的新陈代谢变化进行测量。使用“营养脂质组学”来评估饮食和脂质代谢有可能改变营养研究的研究方式，并极大地提高我们未来确定个人和人群营养需求的能力。

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.