Liproprotein structure-function and disease development: from atherosclerosis to covid-19

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 development of a range of diseases ranging from atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, diabetes and neurogenerative disease, and is linked to severity of viral infection (such as for covid-19).

For the last 7+ years, my group has established 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.