A new survey of an under-explored aspect of human biology uncovers the many roles of the body's 'greasy molecules.'
The sequencing of the human genome promised a revolution in medicine, but scientists soon realized that a genetic blueprint alone does not show the body in action. That required understanding the proteome -- all the proteins, expressed by our genes, forming the cellular machinery that performs the bulk of the body's functions. Now, another set of molecules known as the lipidome -- all the lipids in our bodies -- is filling in more details of human physiology.
Our genome is essentially stable. Our proteome, though influenced by our health and environment, is largely dependent on what's encoded by our genes. In contrast, our lipidome can be directly altered, in part, by what we eat and which microbes live inside our gut, making it more malleable and perhaps more responsive to interventions. But the number and variety of lipid molecules -- there are at least thousands -- has made them hard to study.
The researchers found that although everyone's lipidome has a distinctive signature that remains stable over time, certain types of lipids changed predicatably with a person's health. "Every molecule that is associated with a disease has a chance of telling us more about the mechanism and may be serving as a target for affecting the disease progression," said Daniel Hornburg, PhD, a former post-doctoral scholar in Snyder's lab and co-lead author of the study.
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