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  • 1 March 2020 to 28 February 2021
  • Awards: Pump-priming Awards

The composition of metabolites such as lipids and their derivatives in plasma, serum, urine and tissues can vary substantially between individuals and in health and disease. Advances in analytical data acquisition and knowledge about lipid diversity have enabled the assembly of large biobanks that document serum lipid compositions, and therefore enable the discovery of potential biomarkers in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

Despite this wealth of clinical data there are surprisingly few reports of the structural or functional characterisation of any of these lipid metabolites beyond simple fatty acids, nor attempts to rationalise a direct interaction and functional consequence of dysregulated lipid metabolites derived from these data in disease pathology. Using the immunometabolic receptor GPR84 as a prototype we are building a platform methodology to systematically map lipid metabolites to their receptors and identify immediate downstream functional consequences.

Image title: Clustering and (dis)similarity analysis of lipid metabolites using Cresset ForgeTM software.

coloured image of analysis patterns for lipid metabolites© Professor Angela Russell