Maria Fedorova: "Lipidome plasticity and lipid quality control"

Maintaining homeostasis is one of the key features of cellular and organismal organization. The mechanism behind homeostatic control at molecular level involve dedicated machineries overseeing DNA, protein and lipid qualities. In contrast to DNA and proteins, lipid quality control (LQC) is so far poorly understood and represents an emerging topic. The regulation of the cellular lipid homeostasis in response to various stimuli is important to maintain the physiological status of a cell and to allow adaptation to everchanging environment. Among numerous stimuli cells can experience during their life cycle is redox stress. Lipids are especially sensitive to variations in the levels of reactive oxygen species due to the large number of polyunsaturated acyl chains which can be easily oxidized leading ultimately to the membrane rupture and cell death. Redox stress was studied on the multiple levels with a large set of proteins identified to be responsible for cell survival or death. However, the details mechanism behind lipidome remodelling in pro-oxidative conditions are much less studied. Here we used high resolution LC-MS/MS based lipidomics to address adaptive vs lethal responses of cellular lipidome in pro-oxidative conditions in time resolved manner. We could identify specific lipid signatures up- or down-regulated upon cell death propagation and/or adaptation. Using a combination of high-resolution lipidomics screening and bioinformatics approaches we are aiming to reveal a detailed time-resolved image on cellular lipidome remodelling under redox stress conditions to promote a better understanding on the lipid quality control machinery.