AB SCIEX (Massachusetts, USA) and the University of Wollongong (UOW) (Wollongong, Australia) have formed a partnership to advance research in lipid analysis, as part of AB SCIEX’s academic partnership programme.

The partnership agreement grants AB SCIEX with an exclusive licence to UOW’s patented lipid identification ‘ozone induced dissociation’ (OzID) technology. OzID utilises the power of mass spectrometry to separate one lipid compound from hundreds, subsequently using ozone to cut the lipid at the specific location, namely a double bond. It therefore allows the differentiation of molecules that vary only by the location of their double bonds.

The partnership research plan, funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant, will see AB SCIEX and UOW working together to develop a standardised procedure to determine the location of double bonds within lipids. The development of a standardised procedure will enable the determination of lipid functions, such as energy storage, maintenance of cell membrane structure and roles in hormone signalling.

“Altered lipid metabolism has been linked to such global concerns as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and various cancers”, commented Dr Todd Mitchell, principal investigator from UOW’s School of Health Sciences. “Recent advances in mass spectrometry have spawned the field of lipidomics which together with proteomics, metabolomics and genomics focuses on the systemic study of complex interactions in biological systems.”

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