Milestone in Lipidomics Achieved

Published: 10 Oct 2024

Ring trial enables establishment of ceramide reference values

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After seven years of collaborative efforts, the results from 34 participating laboratories across 19 countries have been summarised in a study published in Nature Communications, representing a significant landmark in the field of lipidomics.

This achievement, involving researchers at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) and scientific teams from all over the world, represents a groundbreaking advance in the establishment of reference values for ceramides, plasma lipids involved in cardiovascular disease risk prediction. The Ceramide Ring Trial was initiated and coordinated by SLING, the Singapore Lipidomics Incubator, and performed under the umbrella of the International Lipidomics Society (ILS).

“It all started with a meeting at NUS between scientists from the major laboratories in the field that agreed that the comparability between lipidomic studies is a major issue,” says Professor Markus Wenk, Dean, College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Visiting Toh Chin Chye Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at NUS Medicine, who initiated this project and is the senior corresponding author on the published study.

Lipidomics – the large-scale study of pathways and networks of cellular lipids in biological systems – aims to understand the roles of lipids in health and disease by analysing their structures, functions, and interactions in cells. Understanding the upper and lower concentration boundaries of lipids is essential for scientific progress and the clinical translation of lipidomics. To do this, the Ceramide Ring Trial was the first step in assessing technical reproducibility across a global network of laboratories.

“This was a true community effort, where most of the labs in the lipidomics field, a private company and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States joined forces with a clear goal in mind. We obtained relevant results for the research community and we benefitted from the expertise of all the groups involved, ” explains Assistant Professor Federico Torta from the Department of Biochemistry and the Precision Medicine Translational Research Programme at NUS Medicine and Cardiovascular & Metabolic Disorders research programme at Duke-NUS Medical School.