Welcome to the Food and Health Engineering Lab at Michigan State University!!
We are a interdisciplinary group dedicated to explore how oxidative stress affects crucial molecules for life, as steroids and lipids. The goals of our laboratory are elucidate molecular mechanisms governing oxidative stress, and to translate our findings to develop biomarkers for prevention and treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases). Current projects are focused on 1) developing drug modulators of cholesterol oxidation to damp inflammation on cardiovascular disease, and 2) metabolomic mapping of oxysterols and other lipid peroxides for risk assessment in highly susceptible populations, 3) Fingerprinting of plant secondary metabolites and understanding its role in life processes.
Our research group focuses in the following omics areas:
- Lipidomics: Mechanism of free radicals reactions on lipids, steroids and lipoproteins (e.g., LDL and HDL) using model, in vitro and in vivo systems. Critical for this research is to determine the products of lipid oxidation and the molecular mechanisms by which these compounds contribute to major chronic diseases.
- Metabolomics: Plant secondary metabolites fingerprinting, developing new strategies for its identification by metabolomics mass spectrometry methods (GC-MS and LC-MS/MS), as well as other spectroscopic tool like FT-IR, EPR and NMR. We also model metabolic pathways to understand/predict metabolic outcomes in life processes.
- Processomics: Understanding the impact of traditional and novel processing technologies on the bioavailability and functionality of phytochemicals on food systems. We rely in several mathematical and multivariate statistical approaches (parametric and non-parametric statistics, and chemical reaction networks, among others).