Robert Ahrends is a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Vienna (Austria), Robert founding member of the International Lipidomics Society and Member of the Lipid Standard Initiative. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Humboldt University of Berlin and spent his postdoctoral time at Stanford Medical School in the department of chemical and systems biology. Currently, his lab and team focus on lipid research by developing omics tools to analyze lipids and their metabolizing enzymes in a cardiovascular context.

Targeting the Lipid Metabolism with LipidCreator and STAMPS to Investigate Fat Cell Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells

We recently introduce different tools working natively with Skyline. Here we would like to present two of these tools which we use in our daily lab routine to reduce time and effort in the development of targeted omics workflows such as we need for the investigation of fat cell differentiation and insulin resistance of preadipocytes. STAMPS, a pathway-centric web service for the development of targeted proteomics assays. STAMPS guides the user by providing several intuitive interfaces for a rapid and simplified method design. Applying our curated framework to signaling and metabolic pathways, we reduced the average assay development time by a factor of ∼150. LipidCreator, is a software that fully supports targeted lipidomics assay development. LipidCreator offers a comprehensive framework to compute MS/MS fragment masses for over 60 lipid classes. LipidCreator provides all functionalities needed to define fragments, manage stable isotope labeling, optimize collision energy and generate in silico spectral libraries. Both tools are fully computationally and analytically validated and prove that there are capable to generate concise targeted experiments to analyze and to dissect the lipid metabolism and lipid-signaling pathways of adipogenesis. Using LipidCreator and STAMPS revealed potential positive feedback from the PTM to the protein concentration level and identified novel regulatory lipid traits impacting fat cell differentiation. Read Less

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