Julijana Ivanisevic

Julijana Ivanisevic is a Head of the Metabolomics and Lipidomics Platform and Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Julijana joined UNIL in 2015 following a postdoctoral training at The Center for Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California (led by Prof. Gary Siuzdak). She received her PhD in chemical biology at the Aix-Marseille University, France, in 2011. The aim of my team at UNIL is to develop new analytical approaches and apply them to biomedical and clinical research to advance our knowledge on cardiometabolic health and improve our healthspan with ageing. To this end, we are involved in longitudinal, metabolome-wide association studies of Swiss population (CoLaus, Complete Health and Heart cohort) in collaboration with clinicians and statistical geneticists.

Presentation

Unleashing the Potential of Lipidomics for Population Health Research 

Lipid metabolism and circulatory lipid levels are tightly associated with our (cardio)metabolic health. Consequently, mass spectrometry (MS)-based lipidomics, able to measure thousands of individual lipid species, has emerged as a powerful phenotyping tool in epidemiological, human population, and in clinical intervention studies. However, ensuring high throughput and reproducible measurement of a wide panel of circulatory lipid species in large-scale studies poses a significant challenge. Even more, epidemiological studies require the acquisition of multiple sample cohorts over extended periods of time and are, therefore, subject to inherent variation in MS detection.

In this talk, I will present our recently developed omics-scale targeted
(LC-MS/MS) lipidomics platform and its application to the analysis of the first subset of thousand fasted plasma samples belonging to apparently healthy participants from prospective Lausanne population study (CoLaus).
From the analytical point of view, I will highlight the importance of automation, stable isotope dilution, and the alternate analysis of reference material, as external quality control. From the biological point of view, I will show the results highlighting the individuality and sex-specificity of acquired lipid signatures.
Finally, I will also touch upon the applicability of the established workflow for the investigation of the remodeling of lipid molecular landscape in response to exposure, such as high-fat diet for example.