A comprehensive metabolomics and lipidomics overview of plasma from patients with Alzheimer's Disease for screening dementia-linked biomarkers

Abstract

Metabolomics is the study of low-molecular weight, non-protein intermediates synthesized endogenously by any given organism. The main aims of metabolomics are to improve the understanding of disease pathophysiology, elucidate biomarkers for diagnosis, and develop therapeutic targets. Among the molecules that make up the metabolome are amino acids, nucleic acids, sugars and lipids; given their importance, the study of these metabolites unfolded in a number of subareas, such as peptidomics, glycomics and lipidomics. Thus, it is easy to understand why this has emerged as an extremely promising research field. Advances in lipidomics are linked to advances in analytical methods such as Mass Spectrometry (MS) and Liquid Chromatography (LC), which can be coupled. Therefore, following the development of analytical methods there is a great demand for data treatment methods, as well as interface between the different equipment and methods used. In addition, after analysis by LC-MS, it is necessary to process a large amount of data considering the three dimensions used in the identification of lipids: retention time, m/z ratio and signal intensity. With this focus, this work aims to search for biomarkers linked with dementia caused by a condition that has major impacts in the aging population: Alzheimer's disease. The comparison of the plasma lipid profile of patients with AD will be carried out from the analysis by two different chromatographic techniques, using computational statistics in order to verify which one presents the best performance. In addition, compounds indicated as potential biomarkers will be characterized based on the use of bioinformatics platforms for this purpose. (AU)