Liproprotein structure-function and disease development: from atherosclerosis to covid-19
Facts
- Contact person:
- Marite Cardenas
- Financer:
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- Swedish Research Council
- Responsible at MaU:
- Marite Cardenas
- Collaborators :
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- Jonas Spaak at the Danderyd University Hospital at Karolinska Institute
- Martin Lund at Clinical University of Freiburg
- Prof. Pedersen at Aarhus University
- Dr Federico Torta and Prof. Markus Went at the Singapore Lipidomics Incubator
- Prof. Cesar Martin and Prof. Ivan Ubarretxena at Biofisika Institute and UPV
- Jan Skov Pedersen Aarhus University
- Time frame:
- 01 January 2023 - 31 December 2026
- Faculty/department:
- Research subject:
Project description
Lipoproteins are nanoparticles delivering fat across the body. Lipoprotein structure and composition is complex, with several classes and subclasses that not only differ greatly in protein/fat ratio but also in terms of specific apolipoproteins (proteins involved in lipoprotein formation/stabilization) and lipid types. Unbalance in lipid metabolism is linked with defective lipoprotein function. Such unbalance can lead to the development of a range of diseases ranging from atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and neurogenerative disease, and is linked to the severity of viral infection (such as for covid-19).
For the last 7+ years, my group has established a methodology to characterize lipoprotein structure and function in a reproducible and systematic way. This enabled the demonstration of different functionality in lipoprotein classes in terms of lipid exchange, and its dependency on lipid type (saturated vs unsaturated fats, or cholesterol). We showed that such difference in part depends on the apolipoprotein type and variant. Finally, we showed that the presence of the SARS-coV2 spike (S) protein affects lipoprotein function which may be due to S protein-induced HDL remodeling in composition and structure. The proposed project will further map the role of specific lipoprotein subclasses in disease development (mainly atherosclerosis and covid19 disease) and will include samples from individuals with varying lipid serum profile.