Lipidomics in Health and Disease

The omics evolution began at the end of the 20^th century with the cloning of the human genome. The 21^st century has already seen the development of comprehensive proteomics analyses, but the emerging evolution is to metabolomics, the definition of which is the identification and quantification of all of the molecular constituents of the cell including its nucleic acids, amino acids, sugars, and fats.  But by far the largest number of distinct molecular species in cellular metabolism lies in the fats (or lipids) where tens of thousands of distinct molecular species exist in cells and tissues. We have developed novel liquid chromatographic-mass spectrometric based lipidomics techniques termed “CLASS” [Annual Reviews of Biochemistry, 80, 301-25 (2011)] and applied them to the overall omics analysis of some five hundred lipid species in immunologically-activated macrophages integrating transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics of lipid metabolites [J Biol Chem, 285, 39976-85 (2010)]. Human plasma has also been profiled to quantify almost six hundred distinct lipid molecular species present across all mammalian lipid categories and this has important implications for the future of clinical medicine and the understanding of the mechanisms of disease [New Eng J Med, 365, 1812-23 (2011)].