Bad Fat
Thursday, 06 April 2023
MedChi Hall, Aberdeen
Just Why is Fat Bad for the Cell?
Using Lipidomics to Understand Disease
Professor Jules Griffin, Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen
Professor Jules Griffin’s research focuses on the application of analytical chemistry to study metabolism at a global level in metabolic diseases. Prof Griffin and team have developed and applied metabolomics and lipidomics tools to investigate aspects of the metabolic syndrome and how nutrition interacts with health across the life course. At the centre of this research has been a desire to understand why fat metabolism can be so detrimental to the cell.
Prof Griffin received his D.Phil. in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford, where he used 13C NMR spectroscopy to study metabolism in the brain. His first Post-doctoral position applied similar approaches to study cardiac metabolism at Harvard Medical School. He took up a second post-doctoral position at Imperial College London, joining during the early stages of the development of metabolomics/metabonomics. Here, he applied these new omictools to understanding how fat metabolism impairs cell function and have been studying this subject ever since.
Prof Griffin was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship which is held at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. In 2011, he took up a joint position with MRC Human Nutrition Research and the University of Cambridge as a programme leader. This was a transformative appointment, allowing his group to move their focus from model systems into human nutrition and experimental medicine. They also developed a number of high throughput metabolomics and lipidomics tools for cohort studies to examine the metabolic syndrome. In July 2021, he joined the Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen as Director.
This seminar will discuss how state of the art analytical chemistry techniques can be used to understand the role of lipids in the cell and how the regulation of lipids can go wrong in diseases of over nutrition that currently threaten to overwhelm the National Health Service.