Lipidomics Expertise Platform

A revolution in mass spectrometric lipid analysis is currently taking place, which will dramatically change our understanding of how lipids interact with genes and proteins to determine cellular functions.

We would like to focus your attention to the Lipidomics Expertise Platform (LEP) which is on the web:

http://www.lipidomics-expertise.de

This platform aims to promote research activities in the field of lipidomics, to understand the:

• Outstanding functional importance of structural lipids and their interaction with proteins
• Function of biologically active lipids in life sciences and human health and disease
• Genome of the lipidome

The LEP is one major objective of the current Specific Support Action “European Lipidomics Initiative; Shaping the life sciences” (ELIfe, http://www.lipidomics.net) of the European Commission.

The LEP lives from a strong participation and input of its members. Please register to this platform and post your expertise related to lipidomics. Moreover, you can post methods used for lipidomics and lipid standards into databases. This information is at the moment only accessible to registered users.

Currently LEP serves as an information platform for lipidomics expertise, lipid standards and methods. As a future perspective this platform should help to standardize lipidome related nomenclatures and to establish and harmonize lipid metabolic pathways/tools in a worldwide effort together with the NIH initiative LIPID MAPS - USA (http://www.lipidmaps.org) and the Japanese Conference on the Biochemistry of Lipids (JCBL) initiative Lipid Bank - Japan (http://lipidbank.jp).

Additionally, this platform has been used for recruiting members for an IP project in the Framework VII Program of the EC.