November 7, 2018
9:00pm – 10:00pm
UCLA Center for Health Sciences, CHS 43-105
EHS & The Molecular Toxicology IDP Present:
Jun Yang, Ph.D.
UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
About the lecture: Metabolomics has been successfully applied in many research fields including biomarker discovery, biotechnology, biochemical mechanism discovery, and in the assessment of clinical effectiveness. However, there are a number of key challenges facing the metabolomics field, which need to be addressed in order to successfully capitalize on the promise of this technology. Specifically, there is a lack of deeper and broader metabolic profiling methods, a lack of easy metabolite identification methodology, and a need for more efficient data mining and interpretation tools.
Among these metabolites, lipids have been specially linked to various human diseases such as inflammation, autoimmunity, obesity, diabetes, and cancer with many different mechanisms and functions. One important mechanism is through bioactive lipid mediators, also called regulatory lipid mediators. These regulatory lipid mediators are metabolites of polyunsaturated fatty acids by cyclooxygenases, lipoxygenases, and cytochrome P450 enzymes. These pathways represent over 75% of pharmaceutical in mass in the world. Profiling of these regulatory lipid mediators is a great tool to study human diseases.
Applying metabolomics techniques in human health research, Dr. Yang is specifically interested in two questions: 1) how human/model animals respond in pathological processes or to the environment toxicant especially through the signaling small molecules especially lipid mediators; and 2) how to use dietary components, with pharmaceutical compounds if needed, to modulate these signaling molecules to treat diseases. It will not only provide mechanistic knowledge on pathology of human diseases but also a feasible treatment to the diseases.
About the speaker: Dr. Yang has over 10 years of experience in analytical chemistry and 9 years of metabolomics experiences, and has been involved in analytical method and data analysis methodology development and the metabolomics and lipidomics platform development. He developed a profiling method for the regulatory lipid mediators including eicosanoids based on LC/MS/MS.
Supported by the UCLA NIEHS Training Grant in Molecular Toxicology T32ES015457 & The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, UCLA CTSI Grant UL1TR001881.
For more information, contact Dr. Oliver Hankinson at ohank@mednet.ucla.edu.