OMIT represents a novel and focused project in the new and rapidly evolving area of bacterial lipids. It has progressed our knowledge of gut associated bacterial lipids and bacterial oxylipins beyond the state of the art including the type and range of lipids form by gut-associated bacteria. In addition, untargeted data generated from OMIT will continue to facilitate and uncover novel bacterial oxylipins.
Long-term, OMIT will have wider societal and socio-economic impacts. HOW? We know the microbiome impacts host physiology and thus health outcomes. We also know that lipids act as signalling molecules and dyslipidaemia is associated with many chronic diseases. We are beginning to understand that the lipids produced by our gut microbiome are also correlated with disease outcomes. OMIT expands, and will continue to expand our current knowledge of the latter and thus open a pandoras box of potential novel lipids that may be utilised for clinicians as biomarkers and in personal medicine, or by the pharmaceutical industry as potential therapeutics to disease. By providing potential biomarkers for chronic disease risk and management, or therapeutics for treatment of chronic disease OMIT will have real societal impact. By aiding the burden of chronic disease OMIT will also have economic impacts by reducing the overall cost of healthcare to government and society.
In addition, open access bacterial lipids databases, results and publications will allow academics to leverage data to progress their specific research question(s) within microbiome or lipidomic research. It will benefit industry, particularly the Mass spectrometry- based industry, who can exploit the results to improve their existing lipidomic software to include bacterial lipid database. Many applications of lipidomic profiling remain confined to the research laboratory; however, this looks set to change and ongoing advances in technology, software, AI means that lipidomics now has significant application within the clinical environment. Thus, in time OMIT will benefit clinicians interested in the emerging subfield of clinical lipidomics as they strive to predict, diagnose, and manage disease based on a individuals lipidome status. OMIT will offer knowledge on how gut microbiome impacts host lipid levels. It will then in turn benefit patients by providing avenues for personalised medicine.
