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Onward to the lipidome
The American National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a US$35 million project to study lipids.
The five-year grant will fund the Lipid Metabolites and Pathways Strategy (LIPID MAPS) Consortium, a large collaborative effort led by the University of California, San Diego.
While genes and proteins have long held starring roles in biomedical research, lipids—fats and oils—often have a more direct effect on human health. The LIPID MAPS Consortium will seek to identify and measure the amounts of all lipids within a cell. This information will give scientists a picture of how lipids interact with each other and with the inner structures of our cells at varying times and locations.
"Today’s large, complex biomedical problems demand more intellectual and physical resources than a single laboratory or small group of laboratories can offer," said Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health. "By funding scientists from diverse fields and bringing them together, this project dramatically increases the likelihood of a strong return on our research investment. We expect to significantly improve our understanding of the role of lipids in many serious diseases."
The new award is a “glue grant,” so named because it enables large-scale biomedical research projects by bringing diverse groups of scientists together. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences originally conceived of glue grants following consultations with leaders in the scientific community who emphasized the importance of confronting intractable biological problems with the expertise of large, multifaceted groups of scientists.
"NIGMS expects that this project will also yield new tools, methods and technologies for sorting out and measuring the changing levels of the 1,000 or more different lipids in a given cell," said Judith Greenberg, Ph.D., acting director of NIGMS.
“Lipids are the most important biomolecules because they are the ultimate controllers and regulators of our bodily processes,” said Edward Dennis, Ph.D., a chemistry and biochemistry professor at the University of California, San Diego, and principal investigator of the LIPID MAPS Consortium. For example, one class of lipids, the sterols, includes the hormones estrogen and testosterone which promote our gender-linked physical traits.
The LIPID MAPS Consortium is divided into six focus areas. The “lipidomics” focus area will investigate six major groupings of lipids. Other scientific focus areas will cover informatics, cell biology, lipid detection and quantitation, and lipid synthesis and characterization. More than 30 researchers at 16 universities and two corporations will be involved.
The bioinformatics focus area will integrate and organize the massive amounts of data the consortium plans to collect. Experimental results and protocols will be available through a public Web site.
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