Federal Grant Award Summary

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro received a $1.33 million Project Grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859), awarded April 1, 2026, with completion scheduled for March 31, 2030. The project develops a cost-effective workflow for unsaturated lipidomics analysis by advancing a novel ion chemistry technique called OZNOXESI (ozone-induced dissociation). The primary deliverables include extending this ion chemistry technology beyond phospholipids to all lipid classes, particularly glycerolipids and sphingolipids, and establishing safe and robust implementation on newer generation mass spectrometer ion sources to make the capability widely accessible to the research community.

Additional project outputs include development of an algorithm to correct for variations in diagnostic ion intensity based on carbon-carbon double bond location along fatty acyl chains, enabling more accurate quantification of lipid regioisomers, and creation of a comprehensive software suite for managing all data processing requirements in lipid analysis. These deliverables collectively provide researchers with a simplified, accessible, and economical solution for identifying and quantifying lipids with precise structural detail at the carbon-carbon regioisomeric level, with applications for detecting disease-related perturbations in lipid isomer ratios.