Michael Witting

Dr. Michael Witting studied applied chemistry with a functional direction in biochemistry at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Science, Nuremberg, Germany, and obtained his PhD in 2013 from the Technical University of Munich. He is a current member of the Metabolomics Society Board of Directors. Since the 1st of January 2021, he has been heading the metabolomics section of the Metabolomics and Proteomics Core at Helmholtz Munich. His main research interests are LC-MS-based metabolomics and lipidomics method development and application and metabolite and lipid identification improvement by retention time prediction and other means of orthogonal data.

Presentation

Mining the Caenorhabditis elegans lipidome using HRMS, ion mobility, and enhanced data analysis strategies.

 The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans represents an important model organism in biomedical research, with many recent studies investigating intact lipids. As the entire C. elegans lipidome is not known yet, so correct lipid annotation and identification are crucial. While known lipid classes can be achieved reproducibly, e.g., by rule-based annotation, the systematic search for novel lipid classes and species needs dedicated data analysis strategies. High-resolution mass spectrometry (HR-MS) is an essential tool for lipid identification in different biological samples, with enhancements from orthogonal information such as retention times (RT) and collisional cross sections (CCS). Here, we present our efforts to reconstruct the C. elegans lipidome from literature curation, in-depth analysis, and annotation of C. elegans lipidomics datasets generated over the last years and measurements of C. elegans reference samples using UHPLC-TIMS-ToF-MS. Based on the obtained data, we were able to generate a blueprint of the C. elegans lipidome and identify new species of phosphorylated glycosphingolipids that had been recently described.