Lipid Oxidation and Quality Division member spotlight

Dr. Marc Pignitter received his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Graz in Austria, then was a visiting research fellow at the National Biomedical EPR Center and the Free Radical Research Center at the Department of Biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2018, he joined the group of Metabolomics Australia in Adelaide. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Vienna, Austria. 

He received the competitive H. P. Kaufmann-Prize 2015 of the German Society for Fat Science (DGF) and the prestigious Australia Awards–Endeavour Research Fellowship in 2018 for his outstanding achievements in the field of lipid research. 

Marc has been a pioneer in applying omics approaches with multiple mass spectrometry technologies to quantitatively detect and identify lipid oxidation products at sub-micromolar levels and then used that data to track oxidation pathways in foods and also biological effects of lipid oxidation products. 

For those unfamiliar with omics approaches, Marc determined structures of hydroperoxides and epoxides in oils and margarine that had been heated vs stored at room temperature by first isolating oxidized fractions from oils by solid-phase extraction, eliminating derivatization steps that alter oxidation products, then separating Individual oxidation products by HPLC. For product identification, ion masses of products were determined by single quad Q-TOF MS and in untargeted omics analyses, this data from heated and stored test samples was compared using XCMS online to determine peaks whose intensity increased or decreased with sample treatment. Ion masses of these marked products were then targeted in subsequent Multiple Reaction Mode [MRM(+)] analyses using triple quad MS to quantitate and identify each of the products. This multiple MS approach detected epoxides at substantially higher levels than hydroperoxides in unreacted lipids and showed that epoxides formed faster than hydroperoxides in early oxidation, providing cogent support for the importance of epoxides in lipid oxidation.

Recently, by applying genomic and metabolomic tools, Marc broke additional new ground revealing that oxidized lipids from food altered cellular phospholipid and amino acid metabolism in gastrointestinal cells, raising questions about a potential role of dietary oxidized lipids in development of inflammatory bowel diseases and other gastrointestinal pathologies. 

Marc is Chairing the 2021 Annual Meeting & Expo session Contemporary analysis of lipid oxidation products: Detecting and quantitating more products at lower levels. Feel free to contact him with papers for this session.

Pignitter papers you may find interesting:

• Grüneis V, Fruehwirth S, Zehl M, Ortner J, Schamann A, Koenig J, Pignitter M. Simultaneous analysis of epoxidized and hydroperoxidized triacylglycerols in canola oil and margarine by LC-MS, J Agric Food Chem, 2019, 67(36), 10174-10184. Doi: 10.1021/acs.jafc.9b03601
• Grüneis V, Pignitter M. Epoxide Value - A Novel Marker for the Quality Assessment of Food Lipids, J Agric Food Chem, 2018, 66(20), 5039-5040. Doi: 10.1021/acs.jafc.8b02037
• Zaunschirm M, Pignitter M. Kopic A, Kessler C, Hochkogler C, Kretschy N, Somoza M, Somoza V. Exposure of human gastric cells to oxidized lipids stimulates pathways of amino acid biosynthesis on a genomic and metabolomic level, Molecules, 2019, 24(22), 4111. Doi: org/10.3390/molecules24224111
• Fruehwirth S, Zehentner S, Salim M, Sterneder S, Tiroch J, Lieder B, Zehl M, Somoza V, Pignitter M. In vitro digestion of grape seed oil inhibits phospholipid-regulating effects of oxidized lipids. Biomolecules, 2020, 10(5), 708. Doi: doi.org/10.3390/biom10050708  

You can also view his 2020 LOQ presentation Enhancing the Shelf Life of Flaxseed Oil by Modifying Oil Manufacturing Processes until June 2021. 

Find out more about the LOQ Division.