Eoin Fahy

Characterization of the human heart mitochondrial proteome

To gain a better understanding of the critical role of mitochondria in cell function, we have compiled an extensive catalogue of the mitochondrial proteome using highly purified mitochondria from normal human heart tissue. Sucrose gradient centrifugation was employed to partially resolve protein complexes whose individual protein components were separated by one-dimensional PAGE. Total in-gel processing and subsequent detection by mass spectrometry and rigorous bioinformatic analysis yielded a total of 615 distinct protein identifications. All protein pI values, molecular weight ranges, and hydrophobicities were represented. The coverage of the known subunits of the oxidative phosphorylation machinery within the inner mitochondrial membrane was >90%. A significant proportion of identified proteins are involved in signaling, RNA, DNA, and protein synthesis, ion transport, and lipid metabolism. The biochemical roles of 19% of the identified proteins have not been defined. This database of proteins provides a comprehensive resource for the discovery of novel mitochondrial functions and pathways.

Lipidomics reveals a remarkable diversity of lipids in human plasma

The focus of the present study was to define the human plasma lipidome and to establish novel analytical methodologies to quantify the large spectrum of plasma lipids. Partial lipid analysis is now a regular part of every patients blood test and physicians readily and regularly prescribe drugs that alter the levels of major plasma lipids such as cholesterol and triglycerides. Plasma contains many thousands of distinct lipid molecular species that fall into six main categories including fatty acyls, glycerolipids, glycerophospholipids, sphingolipids, sterols, and prenols. The physiological contributions of these diverse lipids and how their levels change in response to therapy remain largely unknown. As a first step toward answering these questions, we provide herein an in-depth lipidomics analysis of a pooled human plasma obtained from healthy individuals after overnight fasting and with a gender balance and an ethnic distribution that is representative of the US population. In total, we quantitatively assessed the levels of over 500 distinct molecular species distributed among the main lipid categories. As more information is obtained regarding the roles of individual lipids in health and disease, it seems likely that future blood tests will include an ever increasing number of these lipid molecules.

Reduced-Median-Network Analysis of Complete Mitochondrial DNA Coding-Region Sequences for the Major African, Asian, and European Haplogroups

The evolution of the human mitochondrial genome is characterized by the emergence of ethnically distinct lineages or haplogroups. Nine European, seven Asian (including Native American), and three African mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups have been identified previously on the basis of the presence or absence of a relatively small number of restriction-enzyme recognition sites or on the basis of nucleotide sequences of the D-loop region. We have used reduced-median-network approaches to analyze 560 complete European, Asian, and African mtDNA coding-region sequences from unrelated individuals to develop a more complete understanding of sequence diversity both within and between haplogroups. A total of 497 haplogroup-associated polymorphisms were identified, 323 (65%) of which were associated with one haplogroup and 174 (35%) of which were associated with two or more haplogroups. Approximately one-half of these polymorphisms are reported for the first time here. Our results confirm and substantially extend the phylogenetic relationships among mitochondrial genomes described elsewhere from the major human ethnic groups. Another important result is that there were numerous instances both of parallel mutations at the same site and of reversion (i.e., homoplasy). It is likely that homoplasy in the coding region will confound evolutionary analysis of small sequence sets. By a linkage-disequilibrium approach, additional evidence for the absence of human mtDNA recombination is presented here.

LMSD: LIPID MAPS structure database

The LIPID MAPS Structure Database (LMSD) is a relational database encompassing structures and annotations of biologically relevant lipids. Structures of lipids in the database come from four sources: (i) LIPID MAPS Consortiums core laboratories and partners; (ii) lipids identified by LIPID MAPS experiments; (iii) computationally generated structures for appropriate lipid classes; (iv) biologically relevant lipids manually curated from LIPID BANK, LIPIDAT and other public sources. All the lipid structures in LMSD are drawn in a consistent fashion. In addition to a classification-based retrieval of lipids, users can search LMSD using either text-based or structure-based search options. The text-based search implementation supports data retrieval by any combination of these data fields: LIPID MAPS ID, systematic or common name, mass, formula, category, main class, and subclass data fields. The structure-based search, in conjunction with optional data fields, provides the capability to perform a substructure search or exact match for the structure drawn by the user. Search results, in addition to structure and annotations, also include relevant links to external databases. The LMSD is publicly available at

LIPID MAPS online tools for lipid research

The LIPID MAPS consortium has developed a number of online tools for performing tasks such as drawing lipid structures and predicting possible structures from mass spectrometry (MS) data. A simple online interface has been developed to enable an end-user to rapidly generate a variety of lipid chemical structures, along with corresponding systematic names and ontological information. The structure-drawing tools are available for six categories of lipids: (i) fatty acyls, (ii) glycerolipids, (iii) glycerophospholipids, (iv) cardiolipins, (v) sphingolipids and (vi) sterols. Within each category, the structure-drawing tools support the specification of various parameters such as chain lengths at a specific sn position, head groups, double bond positions and stereochemistry to generate a specific lipid structure. The structure-drawing tools have also been integrated with a second set of online tools which predict possible lipid structures from precursor-ion and product-ion MS experimental data. The MS prediction tools are available for three categories of lipids: (i) mono/di/triacylglycerols, (ii) glycerophospholipids and (iii) cardiolipins. The LIPID MAPS online tools are publicly available at www.lipidmaps.org/tools/.

Regulated Accumulation of Desmosterol Integrates Macrophage Lipid Metabolism and Inflammatory Responses

Inflammation and macrophage foam cells are characteristic features of atherosclerotic lesions, but the mechanisms linking cholesterol accumulation to inflammation and LXR-dependent response pathways are poorly understood. To investigate this relationship, we utilized lipidomic and transcriptomic methods to evaluate the effect of diet and LDL receptor genotype on macrophage foam cell formation within the peritoneal cavities of mice. Foam cell formation was associated with significant changes in hundreds of lipid species and unexpected suppression, rather than activation, of inflammatory gene expression. We provide evidence that regulated accumulation of desmosterol underlies many of the homeostatic responses, including activation of LXR target genes, inhibition of SREBP target genes, selective reprogramming of fatty acid metabolism, and suppression of inflammatory-response genes, observed in macrophage foam cells. These observations suggest that macrophage activation in atherosclerotic lesions results from extrinsic, proinflammatory signals generated within the artery wall that suppress homeostatic and anti-inflammatory functions of desmosterol.

Global organellar proteomics

Cataloging the proteomes of single-celled microorganisms, cells, biological fluids, tissue and whole organisms is being undertaken at a rapid pace as advances are made in protein and peptide separation, detection and identification. For metazoans, subcellular organelles represent attractive targets for global proteome analysis because they represent discrete functional units, their complexity in protein composition is reduced relative to whole cells and, when abundant cytoskeletal proteins are removed, lower abundance proteins specific to the organelle are revealed. Here, we review recent literature on the global analysis of subcellular organelles and briefly discuss how that information is being used to elucidate basic biological processes that range from cellular signaling pathways through protein-protein interactions to differential expression of proteins in response to external stimuli. We assess the relative merits of the different methods used and discuss issues and future directions in the field.

A Mouse Macrophage Lipidome

We report the lipidomic response of the murine macrophage RAW cell line to Kdo2-lipid A, the active component of an inflammatory lipopolysaccharide functioning as a selective TLR4 agonist and compactin, a statin inhibitor of cholesterol biosynthesis. Analyses of lipid molecular species by dynamic quantitative mass spectrometry and concomitant transcriptomic measurements define the lipidome and demonstrate immediate responses in fatty acid metabolism represented by increases in eicosanoid synthesis and delayed responses characterized by sphingolipid and sterol biosynthesis. Lipid remodeling of glycerolipids, glycerophospholipids, and prenols also take place, indicating that activation of the innate immune system by inflammatory mediators leads to alterations in a majority of mammalian lipid categories, including unanticipated effects of a statin drug. Our studies provide a systems-level view of lipid metabolism and reveal significant connections between lipid and cell signaling and biochemical pathways that contribute to innate immune responses and to pharmacological perturbations.

MitoProteome: mitochondrial protein sequence database and annotation system

MitoProteome is an object-relational mitochondrial protein sequence database and annotation system. The initial release contains 847 human mitochondrial protein sequences, derived from public sequence databases and mass spectrometric analysis of highly purified human heart mitochondria. Each sequence is manually annotated with primary function, subfunction and subcellular location, and extensively annotated in an automated process with data extracted from external databases, including gene information from LocusLink and Ensembl; disease information from OMIM; protein-protein interaction data from MINT and DIP; functional domain information from Pfam; protein fingerprints from PRINTS; protein family and family-specific signatures from InterPro; structure data from PDB; mutation data from PMD; BLAST homology data from NCBI NR; and proteins found to be related based on LocusLink and SWISS-PROT references and sequence and taxonomy data. By highly automating the processes of maintaining the MitoProteome Protein List and extracting relevant data from external databases, we are able to present a dynamic database, updated frequently to reflect changes in public resources. The MitoProteome database is publicly available at http://www. mitoproteome.org/. Users may browse and search MitoProteome, and access a complete compilation of data relevant to each protein of interest, cross-linked to external databases.

MITOPRED: a genome-scale method for prediction of nucleus-encoded mitochondrial proteins

MOTIVATION Currently available methods for the prediction of subcellular location of mitochondrial proteins rely largely on the presence of mitochondrial targeting signals in the protein sequences. However, a large fraction of mitochondrial proteins lack such signals, making those tools ineffective for genome-scale prediction of mitochondria-targeted proteins. Here, we propose a method for genome-scale prediction of nucleus-encoded mitochondrial proteins. The new method, MITOPRED, is based on the Pfam domain occurrence patterns and the amino acid compositional differences between mitochondrial and non-mitochondrial proteins. RESULTS MITOPRED could predict mitochondrial proteins with 100% specificity at a 44% sensitivity rate and with 67% specificity at 99% sensitivity. Additionally, it was sufficiently robust to predict mitochondrial proteins across different eukaryotic species with similar accuracy. Based on Matthews correlation coefficient measure, the prediction performance of MITOPRED is clearly superior (0.73) to those of the two popular methods TargetP (0.51) and PSORT (0.53). Using this method, we predicted the nucleus-encoded mitochondrial proteins from six complete genomes (three invertebrate, two vertebrate and one plant species) and estimated the total number in each genome. In human, our method estimated the existence of 1362 mitochondrial proteins corresponding to 4.8% of the total proteome. AVAILABILITY MITOPRED program is freely accessible at http://mitopred.sdsc.edu. Source code is available on request from the authors. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Training data sets are also available at http://mitopred.sdsc.edu