Part I: Lipidomics—A New Perspective to Explore the Mysteries of Life

Everything has its dialectics. Even though we hate high blood fat as it hurts our body, lipid is an irreplaceable component of the human body. Each cell contains phospholipids, whose content is particularly high in brain, nerves, and liver. They are the most vigorous organs of life.

All life activities are affected by lipids. They regulate cell growth, differentiation, aging, and death. They are closely related to intelligence and memory. They also affect the development of many diseases including tumors.

In the 20th century, with the rapid development of genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics, functional genomics and metabolomics came into being in order to fully understand biological phenomena. Lipidomics, originally affiliated with metabolomics, was formally proposed internationally in 2003 as a new independent frontier research field because of its rapid development. 



Lipidomics: A New Perspective on Life



About 70% of the metabolites in plasma are lipids, and lipid metabolism is the first major class of animal and plant metabolomics. Combined with the wide application of mass spectrometry, the development of lipidomics has been greatly accelerated. It has become one of the most active research fields in metabolomics.

In May 2016, researchers from the Institute for Nutritional Sciences, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proved that BTG1 altered hepatic lipid metabolism and improved fatty liver by decreasing the abundance of stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1 (SCD1). (Science Signaling)

Researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and the Richard J. Solove Institute (OSUCCC - James) identified a key signaling pathway used by cancer cells to generate lipids by integrating oncogenic signals, fuel availability and lipid synthesis to support cell division and rapid tumor growth. (November 9, 2015, Cancer Cell).

Researchers from the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University reported that they confirmed that the CREB transcriptional coactivator CRTC2 controls hepatic lipid metabolism by regulating SREBP1. (July 6, 2015, Nature).

Professor Xianlin Han from Zhejiang Chinese Medical University pointed out that there are thousands of lipids in the body, and their metabolism is intertwined through many signal pathways and networks, affecting the development of normal life activities and diseases. It is particularly worth mentioning that the first literature on lipidomics was also published by Professor Xianlin Han in 2003 on the Journal of Lipid Research.

Lipidomics can screen biomarkers for disease diagnosis, disease staging/typing, and prognosis. There are also achievements in drug treatment, such as the development of polyketone anti-microbial, anti-parasitic and anti-tumor drugs. Combined with other omics, it is more complete to clarify that changes in disease at all levels are interrelated.

Lipidomics has been widely used in the study of various clinical diseases, such as nervous, digestive, cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems. Tumors are the focus of research.

At present, the main contents of lipidomics research include analysis and identification of lipids and their metabolites, lipid function and metabolism regulation (including key genes/proteins/enzymes), lipid metabolism pathways and networks. In particular, it is expected to make breakthroughs in lipidomics research in the coming years.

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