Ecological lipidology

Dietary lipids (DLs), particularly sterols and fatty acids, are precursors for endogenous lipids that, unusually for macronutrients, shape cellular and organismal function long after ingestion. These functions – cell membrane structure, intracellular signalling, and hormonal activity – vary with the identity of DLs, and scale up to influence health, survival, and reproductive fitness, thereby affecting evolutionary change. Our Ecological Lipidology approach integrates biochemical mechanisms and molecular cell biology into evolution and nutritional ecology. It exposes our need to understand environmental impacts on lipidomes, the lipid specificity of cell functions, and predicts the evolution of lipid-based diet choices. Broad interdisciplinary implications of Ecological Lipidology include food web alterations, species responses to environmental change, as well as sex differences and lifestyle impacts on human nutrition, and opportunities for DL-based therapies.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  eLife

• Publication date

  2022-09-07

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7554/eLife.79288PMID 36069772PMCID 9451535
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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