Federico Tesio Torta
Research Assistant Professor, Singapore Lipidomics Incubator (SLING), Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
Email: federico_torta@nuhs.edu.sg

What are your present research interests?

My main interest is in protein and lipid biochemistry. This has been applied to many different studies, covering for example plants growth, viral infection mechanisms, neuronal pathologies in flies and humans, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, obesity, cancer.

Do you have a distinctive viewpoint to your research?

The growth of high-throughput omics technologies offers an amazing opportunity to capture the whole picture of biological systems in a hypothesis-free and unbiased mode. I would like to pool some of these technologies in a single environment.

What do you see as your future research directions?

My present and future interests lie at the intersection between lipids and proteins and in creating new analytical methodologies for these studies based on mass spectrometry. Applications of my knowledge in both fields are Native Mass Spectrometry of protein-lipid complexes and integration between metabolomics and proteomics for clinical research.

Does your laboratory have a particularly strong research expertise?

We focus on mass spectrometry of small molecules, lipids and proteins for both basic and clinical research.

Recent Publications

1. Burla B, Arita M, Arita M, Bendt AK, Cazenave-Gassiot A, Dennis EA, Ekroos K, Han X, Ikeda K, Liebisch G, Lin MK, Loh TP, Meikle PJ, Orešič M, Quehenberger O, Shevchenko A, Torta F, Wakelam MJO, Wheelock CE, Wenk MR. MS-based lipidomics of human blood plasma: a community-initiated position paper to develop accepted guidelines. J Lipid Res. 2018; 59(10):2001-2017.
2. Chew WS, Seow WL, Chong JR, Lai MKP, Torta F, Wenk MR, Herr DR. Sphingolipidomics analysis of large clinical cohorts. Part 1: Technical notes and practical considerations. Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2018; 504(3):596-601.
3. Vu TM, Ishizu AN, Foo JC, Toh XR, Zhang F, Whee DM, Torta F, Cazenave-Gassiot A, Matsumura T, Kim S, Toh SES, Suda T, Silver DL, Wenk MR, Nguyen LN. Mfsd2b is essential for the sphingosine-1-phosphate export in erythrocytes and platelets.
Nature. 2017 Oct 26;550(7677):524-528.
4. Lees JA, Messa M, Sun EW, Wheeler H, Torta F, Wenk MR, De Camilli P, Reinisch KM. Lipid transport by TMEM24 at ER-plasma membrane contacts regulates pulsatile insulin secretion. Science. 2017; 355(6326).