Lingjun Li, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry, Janis Apinis Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, received a 4% ranking on her NIH R01 grant renewal application to continue her innovative research on the development and application of mass spectrometry-based technology and strategies to understand the roles of signaling peptides in feeding behavior. 

The growing incidence of eating disorders and obesity, and their associated health costs have led to intensive research efforts directed at understanding the mechanisms and signaling pathways that control and regulate food intake. Despite decades of work on individual neurochemical systems, the general organizational principles understanding neuromodulation are still poorly understood. A systematic view of all molecular players involved in the process is lacking.  To address this critical knowledge and technological gap, Li and her team propose to develop new bioanalytical methods to elucidate the complex identities and functional roles of neuropeptides in food intake via combined mass spectrometric and physiological approaches. 

This competitive renewal will both develop novel analytical capabilities with focus on new multiplex quantitative tagging reagent development, mass spectral imaging and in vivo microdialysis for high throughput quantitative peptidomics and advance our knowledge about neuromodulation and functional consequences of neuropeptide multiplicity in feeding. In collaboration with UW-Madison Associate Professor Brian Baldo, Department of Psychiatry, the team will conduct parallel neuropeptidomic studies in crustacean and mammalian nervous system involved in feeding, which will accelerate the pace towards the development of new therapeutic strategies for obesity and feeding disorders that have become a big concern of modern societies. 

Li’s research interests include various aspects of drug discovery and drug action including analytical neurochemistry, biological mass spectrometry, multi-omics based systems biology, biomarker discovery, and chemical biology. Her current focus is the development of new analytical tools to advance neuroscience and biomedical research.