Mass Spec Down Under – Find out what Prof. Yu Xia have in store at IMSC 2024

International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC) 2024 is set to take place in Melbourne, Australia, on August 17–23, 2024. In the lead-up to the show, some of the organizers and expert speakers will be chatted with to find out more about their research passions, what they’re most looking forward to at the show, and why the trip “Down Under” in August should be seriously considered.

Yu Xia

Professor, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, China 

I was mentored by Professors Scott A. McLuckey and Graham R. Cooks during my PhD and post-doc training at Purdue University, respectively, with a focus on gas-phase ion chemistry of biomolecules. I was fascinated by the distinct fragmentation chemistry associated with peptide radical ions, as observed in electron transfer dissociation, and the wealth of structural information they can provide. I carried on this interest to my independent research and utilized radical chemistry as a unique approach to characterize lipids at detailed structural levels by mass spectrometry. Based on this principle, my group has developed a suite of lipidomic tools that can resolve and quantify coexisting lipid isomers. We are leveraging these cutting-edge tools to uncover unusual lipid structures and offer new insights into lipid metabolism linked to health and disease.

Structural lipidomics stands as an exciting and fast-evolving research field, particularly given the structural complexity of lipids, which encompasses over 40,000 documented structures. This complexity underscores the urgent need for the development of innovative MS/MS methods capable of discerning subtle structural differences in lipids. Due to active research efforts from many academic labs, the arsenal of available isomer-resolved MS/MS techniques has significantly expanded in the past decade. Notably, several of these methods have already been integrated into commercial mass spectrometers, thereby enhancing accessibility to deep-structural lipidomic profiling for a broader scientific community. I strongly believe that isomer-resolved MS/MS will also serve as a catalyst for advancing other important frontiers of lipidomics, such as single cell lipidomics, spatial lipidomics, and temporal lipidomics, by providing an isomer-resolution into the research.

At IMSC, I will present the latest development of isomer-resolved tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) methods and integrated workflows developed in my group, which offer large-scale lipid analysis at detailed structural levels, including the location of C=C, sn-position, and methyl branching. I will showcase how we have pushed the boundaries of detection for lipids present in low abundance, such as glycosphingolipids and phosphoinositol phosphates. By combining lipid class-specific enrichment strategies with orthogonal separations and isomer-resolved MS/MS, we reveal an unexpected diversity of these lipid classes in mammalian lipidome, which would have otherwise remained elusive. More importantly, I will demonstrate that isomer quantitation at detailed structural levels suffers less from interpersonal variation and enables more sensitive discovery of differential lipids for disease phenotyping.

原文链接：IMSC 2024: Mass Spec Down Under Part 5 – Meet the Speakers (theanalyticalscientist.com)