Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine

Lipidomics Importance

Lipidomics is that the large-scale study of pathways and networks of cellular lipids in biological systems. The word "lipidome" is employed to explain the entire lipid profile within a cell, tissue, organism, or ecosystem and may be a subset of the "metabolome" which also includes the three other major classes of biological molecules: proteins/amino-acids, sugars and nucleic acids. Lipidomics may be a relatively recent research field that has been driven by rapid advances in technologies like mass spectrometry (MS), nuclear resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, dual polarisation interferometry and computational methods, including the popularity of the role of lipids in many metabolic diseases like obesity, atherosclerosis, stroke, hypertension and diabetes. This rapidly expanding field complements the large progress made in genomics and proteomics, all of which constitute the family of systems biology. Lipidomics research involves the identification and quantification of the thousands of cellular lipid molecular species and their interactions with other lipids, proteins, and other metabolites. Investigators in lipidomics examine the structures, functions, interactions, and dynamics of cellular lipids and therefore the changes that occur during perturbation of the system. Han and Gross first defined the sector of lipidomics through integrating the precise chemical properties inherent in lipid molecular species with a comprehensive mass spectrometric approach. Although lipidomics is under the umbrella of the more general field of "metabolomics", lipidomics is itself a definite discipline thanks to the individuality and functional specificity of lipids relative to other metabolites.      

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