When it comes to lipid research – the study of fat-related molecules in living organisms – Rutgers has some of the field’s top scientists. They have expertise in nutritional science, food science, biophysics, chemistry, and physiology, and have made groundbreaking discoveries in lipid structure and metabolism.
Trouble is, Rutgers seldom is recognized for its expertise. Mention lipid research in scientific circles, and you’re likely to hear of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the University of Alberta in Canada, both with well-funded, high-profile institutes.
Professor of Food Science George Carman is out to change that – not only to gain much-deserved recognition, an essential move to securing funding, but also to increase the field of experts needed to understand and help cure lipid-based diseases. These include conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and atherosclerosis, which are reaching epidemic levels in western society.
During the past few months, Carman worked with School of Environmental and Biological Sciences Dean Bob Goodman to establish the Rutgers Center for Lipid Research (RCLR). The center will formally mark its kickoff December 3 with a presentation by Phil Yeagle, the new dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers–Newark and an accomplished lipid biophysicist and biochemist. Yeagle is a charter member of RCLR, contributing his expertise in membrane lipids and protein structure.
Lipids include energy-storing body fat molecules known as triglycerides and their components known as fatty acids, as well as cholesterol and fat-soluble vitamins. Vitamin A, for example, is recognized for its importance in vision and fetal development. Lipids also are essential structural components of life, such as the phospholipids that make up cell membranes.
“Over the years, largely by chance, Rutgers built a faculty skilled in lipid metabolism,” Carman said, “but we generally landed in two different departments – food science and nutritional sciences. We tended to see each other more often at outside conferences than here at the university.”
At one of these conferences in 2005, the Rutgers faculty decided to meet on campus once a month to compare research notes and hear graduate students and postdoctoral fellows discuss their work. The faculty started developing more formal collaborations – working on joint problems and broadening students’ interactions. Several of the faculty got together to compete for an instrumentation grant from the National Institutes of Health and now have a new high-resolution mass spectrometer that would have been too expensive for any one lab to acquire and maintain.
Carman explains that even though the fields of food science and nutritional science have a somewhat different focus – the former on making food products and the latter on how food is used by the body – there still are many areas of overlap. Lipid science is one of those, and one that many of the Rutgers faculty had in common.
"As we worked together, we found people in other departments who had much to contribute,” Carman said. He cited Dawn Brasaemle, Joseph Dixon, Ariel Igal, and Judith Storch in nutritional sciences; his food science colleague Loredana Quadro; cell biologist Charles Martin in the School of Arts and Sciences; Rutgers–Newark biophysical chemist Richard Mendelsohn; and physiologist Hong Ruan at the University of Medicine and Dentistry–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
The study of lipids has grown over the past 30 years because so many diseases are based on lipid metabolism. “These diseases always were there, but people didn’t know the basis of them,” Carman said. And while much of the investigation into these diseases is in clinical areas, there still is exciting work that needs to be done at the molecular level as well. “When lipid synthesis or turnover goes awry, then you have disease. It could be a gene that is mutated or an enzyme that is not working.”
By studying genes and enzymes in yeast, as Carman does, or in mammalian cells or animals, as his RCLR colleagues do, the researchers hope their knowledge can be applied to the human condition.
Carman notes the new center essentially is a grassroots effort in which faculty took the initiative to call attention to their efforts through the center’s website and by jointly publishing research in leading journals. This contrasts with the Dutch and Canadian efforts, which were stimulated and fueled by government and industry sources. The Alberta program, for example, is amply underwritten by the province’s canola oil producers and associated agriculture groups. Carman envisions the Rutgers expertise, especially now that it has been formalized as a center, attracting the attention of New Jersey’s pharmaceutical industry for collaboration and funding.
Students and faculty interested in learning more about the center are encouraged to attend the kickoff event on December 3, in Cook Campus Center rooms 202 A and B, at 2 p.m. Following Yeagle’s talk will be a poster session highlighting research by RCLR member laboratories.