Prof. Adriana Zardini Buzatto and her Research in Lipidomics
Adriana is an emerging leader in lipidomics, which analyzes lipid molecules in biological fluids to investigate physiological and pathological processes. She was appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary (UCalgary) in July 2023.
With a master’s degree in metabolomics, a PhD in lipidomics, and industry experience, Adriana uses radical technology to address challenges in clinical and environmental research, promising a fresh and highly translational outlook on longstanding issues within the field. Adriana’s lab at the University of Calgary concentrates on four key areas: technological advancement, lipid biomarkers for human diseases, intercellular mechanisms, and the microbiome. Adriana and her team are working on creating methods and tools that are dependable, validated, and usable in real-world environments outside of the research lab. Specifically, she is keen on applying lipidomics to study neurodegeneration.
Metabolomics and Lipidomics
In the interview, Adriana highlights the potential of lipidomics to reveal previously unknown processes both within the human body and beyond, as well as to develop practical tools with real-world applications that can benefit the broader population. She emphasizes the method’s versatility, noting that lipids are present in plants, soil, bacteria, and fungi, which makes lipidomics an excellent tool for exploring the One Health concept—the interconnectedness of human health, the environment, and animals. Nevertheless, Adriana acknowledges that lipidomics requires further development to become a reliable and translatable tool. Despite these challenges, she believes lipidomics holds great promise for providing valuable insights into human health, environmental issues, neurodegeneration, antibiotic resistance, and even applications in plants and renewable energy sources.
Lipidomics at TMIC
Global (Untargeted) Lipidomics Profiling: Using a cutting-edge method to analyze the lipidome in both positive and negative ionization. It typically detects, identifies and relatively quantifies more than 5,000 lipids for positive ionization and more than 2,000 lipids for negative ionization. This is a one-stop analysis where it includes all sample preparation, lipid extraction, LC-MS analysis, data analysis, lipid identification, data normalization, and statistical analysis (PCA, PLS-DA, Volcano plots)
Targeted Lipidomics: Extraction, separation, and quantification of 4 neutral lipid classes and 9 phospholipid classes using GC-FAMES-MS.
