Carmen Bedia

Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC) Barcelona · Envirnomental Chemistry

InSAR coherence-change detection (CCD) is a promising remote sensing technique that is able to map areas affected by torrential sediment transport triggered by flash floods in arid environments. CCD maps the changes in the interferometric coherence between synthetic aperture radar images (InSAR coherence), a parameter that measures the stability of...

Coherence change detection (CCD) is a remote sensing technique used to map phenomena that, under certain conditions, can be directly related to changes in Interferometric SAR (InSAR) coherence. Mapping the areas affected by sediment transport events in arid environments is one of the most common applications of CCD. However, the reliability of thes...

Background: The high recurrence of glioblastoma (GB) that occurs adjacent to the resection cavity within two years of diagnosis urges an improvement of therapies oriented to GB local control. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has been proposed to cleanse infiltrating tumor cells from parenchyma to ameliorate short long-term progression-free survival. We...

Although numerous studies support a dose–effect relationship between Endocrine disruptors (EDs) and the progression and malignancy of tumors, the impact of a chronic exposure to non-lethal concentrations of EDs in cancer remains unknown. More specifically, a number of studies have reported the impact of Aldrin on a variety of cancer types, includin...

The impact of hazardous materials, such as Hg, on life is far from being understood and due to the high number of polluted sites it has generated great concern. A biochemical and lipidomic approach was used to assess the effects of Hg on the saltmarsh halophyte Halimione portulacoides. Plants were collected at two sites of a Hg contaminated saltmar...

Air pollution constitutes an environmental problem that it is known to cause many serious adverse effects on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The chemical characterization of particulate matter (PM) is key for a better understanding of the associations between chemistry and toxicological effects. In this work, the chemical composition an...

Despite numerous studies support a dose-effect relation between Endocrine disruptors (EDs) and tumor progression and malignancy, the effects of chronic exposure to non-lethal concentrations of EDs in cancer remains unknown. Previous studies demonstrated induction of the malignant phenotype in DU145 prostate cancer (PCa) cells after chronic exposure...

Salt marshes are coastal ecosystems which are declining due to global warming and pollution, such as mercury (Hg) pollution. The extra- and intracellular mechanisms of tolerance to Hg in plants are identified but the involvement of the plasma membrane is poorly known. This study aims to identify the effects induced by Hg in plant membranes and to u...

Microplastics have become an emerging environmental issue as a result of their ubiquity, persistence, and intrinsic toxic potential. In addition, their ability to sorb and transport a wide variety of environmental pollutants (i.e. “Trojan Horse” effect) exert significant adverse impacts upon ecosystems. The toxicological evaluation of the single an...

Air quality indicators, i.e., PM10, NO2, O3, benzo[a]pyrene, and several organic tracer compounds were evaluated in an urban traffic station, a sub-urban background station, and a rural background station of the air quality network in Catalonia (Spain) from summer to winter 2019. The main sources that contribute to the organic aerosol and PM toxici...

Chemical imaging aims to characterize the molecular patterns present in a tissue or surface. High-resolution images with high content of molecular information represent a clear advantage in many research areas, such as in biomedicine. Specific molecular patterns, when related to pathological traits, could help understanding the molecular events rel...

Mass spectrometry has become one of the methods of choice in the analytical field due to its high sensitivity and selectivity to retrieve structural information allowing the univocal identification of compounds. From a chemometric point of view, mass spectrometry generates challenging datasets because of their large size with thousands of mass-to-c...

Prostate cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, principally occurs in over 50-year-old men. Nowadays there is urgency to discover biomarkers alternative to prostate-specific antigen, as it cannot discriminate patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia from clinically significant forms of prostatic cancer. In the present paper,...

Current histology techniques, such as tissue staining or histochemistry protocols, provide very limited chemical information about the tissues. Chemical imaging technologies such as infrared, Raman, and mass spectrometry imaging, are powerful analytical techniques with a huge potential in describing the chemical composition of sample surfaces. In t...

GRP94 is an ATP-dependent chaperone able to regulate pro-oncogenic signaling pathways. Previous studies have shown a critical role of GRP94 in brain metastasis (BrM) pathogenesis and progression. In this work, an untargeted lipidomic analysis revealed that some lipid species were altered in GRP94-deficient cells, specially GM2 and GM3 gangliosides....

Background: Genome-scale metabolic models (GSMM) integrating transcriptomics have been widely used to study cancer metabolism. This integration is achieved through logical rules that describe the association between genes, proteins, and reactions (GPRs). However, current gene-to-reaction formulation lacks the stoichiometry describing the transcript...

In recent years, omics sciences have hugely developed due to the increasing interest on the understanding of systems biology and the advancement of high-throughput analytical technologies. These instruments share in common the generation of high amounts of data that need to be handled and processed to extract the relevant information. In the presen...

Background: Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is known to be one of the most important environmental hazards acting on the skin. The most part of UV radiation is absorbed in the epidermis, where keratinocytes are the most abundant and exposed cell type. Lipids have an important role in skin biology, not only for their important contribution to the mainte...

Temperature is one of the most critical parameters for yeast growth, and it has deep consequences in many industrial processes where yeast is involved. Nevertheless, the metabolic changes required to accommodate yeast cells at high or low temperatures are still poorly understood. In this work, the ultimate responses of these induced transcriptomic...

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation present in sunlight has been related to harmful effects in skin such as premature aging and skin cancer. In order to study the effects of UV radiation on the skin, many investigations have been carried out at transcriptomic and proteomic levels. However, the studies on the effects of UV radiation on lipid composition are...

Data fusion of different imaging techniques allows a comprehensive description of chemical and biological systems. Yet, joining images acquired with different spectroscopic platforms is complex due to the different sample orientation and image spatial resolution. Whereas matching sample orientation is often solved by performing suitable affine tran...

The increasing complexity of omics research has encouraged the development of new instrumental technologies able to deal with these challenging samples. In this way, the rise of multidimensional separations should be highlighted due to the massive amounts of information that provide with an enhanced analyte determination. Both proteomics and metabo...

Untargeted liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analysis generates massive amounts of information-rich mass data which presents storage and processing challenges. In this work, the validation of a recently proposed procedure for LC-MS data compression and processing is presented, using as example the analysis of lipid mixtures...

Chlorpyrifos (CPF) is a worldwide used pesticide that raises concerns from the environmental and human health perspectives. The presence of pesticides such as CPF in edible vegetables has been already reported, but little is known about the effects induced by this pesticide stress on the morphology, oxidative response and lipid composition of treat...

Omic sciences attempt to the comprehensive study of the complex interactions between molecules in the different systems biology layers. The main omic technologies include genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. With the progress and development of new postgenomic technologies, omics studies are becoming increasingly prevalent and m...

In the environment, organisms are constantly interacting with stressors, either physical, such as light and temperature, or chemicals, such as pesticides or drugs. In all cases, organisms respond to these stressors by means of changes in gene expression and protein activity, which is ultimately reflected in the metabolite composition. Therefore, th...

We are witnesses of a revolution in a variety of research fields due to the development of high-throughput analytical techniques that have caused the emergence of omic sciences. In all these new research fields, the primary goal is to obtain the maximum information from the different biological levels to understand their structure, function or dyna...

The study of pollutant effects on living organisms provides information about the possible biological and environmental response to a contaminant. Progression of prostate cancer may be related to exposure to pesticides or other chemical substances. In this work, the effect of the pesticide aldrin on human prostate cancer cells (DU145) is studied us...

The use of sparseness in chemometrics is a concept that has increased in popularity. The advantage is, above all, a better interpretability of the results obtained. In this work, sparseness is implemented as a constraint in multivariate curve resolution - alternating least squares (MCR-ALS), which aims at reproducing raw (mixed) data by a bilinear...

A new procedure based on the simultaneous analysis of multiple mass spectrometry images using multivariate curve resolution is presented in this work. Advantages of the application of the proposed approach are shown for three cases of plant studies demonstrating its potential usefulness in metabolomics studies, particularly in lipidomics. In the fi...

It is increasingly clear that significant alterations in the lipid profile of cancer cells accompany tumor progression and metastasis. These changes are induced by a metabolic reprogramming which is aimed to enhance malignant phenotype in cancer cells. In this context, genome-scale metabolic models (GSMM) have emerged as a valuable platform to inte...

It is increasingly clear that significant alterations in the lipid profile of cancer cells accompany tumor progression and metastasis. These changes are induced by a metabolic reprogramming which is aimed to enhance malignant phenotype in cancer cells. In this context, genome-scale metabolic models (GSMM) have emerged as a valuable platform to inte...

Endocrine disruptors (EDs) are a class of environmental toxic molecules able to interfere with the normal hormone metabolism. Despite numerous studies support a dose-effect relation between ED and tumor progression and malignancy, our understanding of the effects of chronic exposure to non-lethal concentrations of EDs in cancer metabolism still rem...

Application of chemometric methods to mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) data faces a bottleneck concerning the vast size of the experimental data sets. This drawback is critical when considering high-resolution mass spectrometry data, which provide several thousand points for each considered pixel. In this work, different approaches have been tested...

A large number of studies highlight a dose-effect relation between endocrine disruptors (EDs) and tumor progression and malignancy. However our understanding of the effects of chronic exposure to non-lethal concentrations of EDs in cancer metabolism still remains limited. Here, we study the metabolic profile of DU145 prostate cancer cells before an...

Cyanobacteria are a group of photosynthetic, nitrogen-fixing bacteria present in a wide variety of habitats such as freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems. In this work, the effects of As(III), a major toxic environmental pollutant, on the lipidomic profiles of two cyanobacteria species (Anabaena and Planktothrix agardhii) were assessed by...

Although several reports describe the metabolic fate of sphingoid bases and their analogs, as well as their action and that of their phosphates as regulators of sphingolipid metabolizing-enzymes, similar studies for 3 ketosphinganine (KSa), the product of the first committed step in de novo sphingolipid biosynthesis, have not been reported. In this...

Significance Legionella pneumophila is the causative agent of Legionnaires’ disease. It translocates a large repertoire of effectors into the host cell through a specialized secretion system to subvert cellular defenses. A key characteristic of this pathogen is that the majority of its effectors are encoded by eukaryotic-like genes acquired through...

Epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a biological process that plays a crucial role in cancer metastasis. Although studies regarding the EMT mechanisms are usual in terms of gene expression and protein functions, little is known about the involvement of lipids in EMT. In this work, an untargeted lipidomic analysis was performed to reveal w...

Endocrine disruptors (EDs) are environmental toxic molecules that can interfere with the hormone metabolism in mammals. It is widely accepted a dose-effect relation between these molecules and tumor progression and malignancy. However our understanding of the effects of chronic exposure to non-lethal concentrations of EDs in cancer metabolism still...

Ceramidases catalyze the cleavage of ceramides into sphingosine and fatty acids. Previously, we reported on the use of the fluorogenic ceramide analogues RBM14 to determine acid ceramidase (AC) activity. In this work we investigated the activity of other amidohydrolases on compounds RBM14. Both bacterial and human purified neutral ceramidases (NC),...

Endocrine disruptors (EDs) are a class of environmental toxic molecules able to interfere with the normal hormone metabolism. Numerous studies involve EDs exposure to initiation and development of cancers, including prostate cancer. In this work, three different EDs (aldrin, aroclor 1254 and chlorpyrifos (CPF)) were investigated as potential induce...

Lipids are a broad group of biomolecules involved in diverse critical biological roles such as cellular membrane structure, energy storage or cell signaling and homeostasis. Lipidomics is the -omics science that pursues the comprehensive characterization of lipids present in a biological sample. Different analytical strategies such as nuclear magne...

A better understanding of the functions sphingolipids play in living organisms can be achieved by analyzing the biochemical and physiological changes that result from genetic alterations of sphingolipid metabolism. This review summarizes the current knowledge gained from studies both on human patients and mutant animals (mice, cats, dogs, and cattl...

Glycosphingolipids, which are abundant at the surface of melanoma cells, play crucial roles in tumor progression. We investigated whether a newly described glycosphingolipid hydrolase, encoded by the GBA2 gene, can modulate human melanoma cell growth and death. GBA2 expression was quantified on melanoma cells by RT-qPCR. The antiproliferative effec...

Although the sphingolipid ceramide exhibits potent tumor suppressor effects, efforts to harness this have been hampered by poor solubility, uptake, bioavailability, and metabolic conversion. Therefore, identification of avenues to improve efficacy is necessary for development of ceramide-based therapies. In this study we used mutant p53, triple neg...

Sphingolipids are membrane lipids that play important roles in the regulation of cell functions and homeostasis. Alterations in their metabolism have been associated with several pathologies. For this reason, therapeutic strategies based on the design of small molecules to restore sphingolipid levels to their physiological condition have rapidly em...

Autophagy is an evolutionary conserved process by which cells recycle intracellular materials to maintain homeostasis in different cellular contexts. Under basal conditions it prevents accumulation of damaged proteins and organelles; during starvation, autophagy provides cells with sufficient nutrients to survive. Sphingolipids are a family of bioa...

Ceramidases are ubiquitous amidohydrolases that catalyze the cleavage of ceramides into sphingosine and fatty acids. This reaction exerts a cytoprotective role in physiological conditions, while altered ceramidase activities favour a number of human diseases. Among these diseases, several reports point to important roles of ceramidases, mainly the...

Dacarbazine (DTIC) is the treatment of choice for metastatic melanoma, but its response in patients remains very poor. Ceramide has been shown to be a death effector and to play an important role in regulating cancer cell growth upon chemotherapy. Among ceramidases, the enzymes that catabolize ceramide, acid ceramidase (aCDase) has been implicated...

Acid ceramidase (aCDase) is one of several enzymes responsible for ceramide degradation within mammalian cells. As such, aCDase regulates the intracellular levels of the bioactive lipid ceramide. An inherited deficiency of aCDase activity results in Farber disease (FD), also called lipogranulomatosis, which is characterized by ceramide accumulation...

Sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) is a bioactive sphingolipid metabolite involved in cancer development through stimulation of cell survival, proliferation, migration, and angiogenesis. Irreversible degradation of S1P is catalyzed by S1P lyase (SPL). The human SGPL1 gene that encodes SPL maps to a region often mutated in cancers. To investigate the eff...

(Chemical Equation Presented) Natural born killers: Nonglycosidic α-galactosylceramide (α-GalCer) analogues, with a polyhydroxylated aminocyclohexane moiety as the galactose surrogate, constitute a new class of charged NKT cell agonists. One of these compounds, HS44, promotes in vitro NKT cell expansion in a similar fashion to α-GalCer but with low...

Illuminating an ER enzyme: We report on the design and synthesis of a fluorogenic chemical sensor (1) to measure sphingosine-1-phosphate lyase activity in high-throughput screening formats, as well as its validation using lyase knockout (Sgpl1−/−) cells.

Farber disease is a rare lysosomal storage disorder (LSD) caused by a deficiency of acid ceramidase (AC) activity and subsequent accumulation of ceramide. Currently, there is no treatment for Farber disease beyond palliative care and most patients succumb to the disorder at a very young age. Previously, our group showed that gene therapy using onco...

The acid ceramidase (AC) inhibitory activity of octanoylamides, p-tert-butylbenzamides and pivaloylamides of several 2-substituted aminoethanols is reported. All the aminoethanol amides bearing a hexadecyl substituent (C16), as well as (S)-N-(1-(hexadecylthio)-3-hydroxypropan-2-yl)pivaloylamide (SC16-tb) were inhibitory in cell lysates overexpressi...

A novel mechanism-based dihydroceramide desaturase inhibitor (XM462) in which the substrate C5 methylene group is replaced by a sulfur atom is reported. Dihydroceramide desaturase inhibition occurred both in vitro and in cultured cells with IC(50) values of 8.2 and 0.78 microM, respectively, at a substrate concentration of 10 microM. In vitro exper...

Referencia OEPM: P200500435.-- Fecha de solicitud: 25/02/2005.-- Titular: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). Compuesto inhibidor de la enzima ceramidasa, procedimiento de síntesis, composición farmacéutica que lo contenga y sus aplicaciones (ver figura en archivo de texto adjunto). La invención describe unos nuevos derivados de...

Several investigations have shown that acid ceramidase inhibitors are potential antiproliferative and cytostatic drugs for cancer chemotherapy. The combinatorial chemistry approach for the discovery of acid ceramidase inhibitors requires the availability of a high-throughput enzyme assay. The synthesis of a novel fluorogenic ceramidase substrate, a...

The synthesis of novel N-acylethanolamines and their use as inhibitors of the aCDase is reported here. The compounds are either 2-oxooctanamides or oleamides of sphingosine analogs featuring a 3-hydroxy-4,5-hexadecenyl tail replaced by ether or thioether moieties. It appears that, within the 2-oxooctanamide family, the C3-OH group of the sphingosin...

Dihydroceramide desaturase is the last enzyme in the biosynthesis of ceramide de novo. The cyclopropene-containing sphingolipid GT11 is a competitive inhibitor of dihydroceramide desaturase. The biological effects of chemical modification of the GT11 amide linkage are reported in this article. Either N-methyl substitution or replacement of the amid...

Referencia OEPM: P200402456.-- Fecha de solicitud: 15/10/2004.-- Titular: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). Procedimiento para la obtención de compuestos derivados de ciclopropenilesfingosina. En la presente invención se describe un nuevo procedimiento de síntesis de derivados de ciclopropenilesfingosina, los cuales pueden ser...

Referencia OEPM: P200302767.-- Fecha de solicitud: 25/11/2003.-- Titular: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). Utilización de derivados de ciclopropenilesfingosina para la elaboración de una composición farmacéutica moduladora de la actividad de ceramidasa, y sus aplicaciones. La presente invención describe la actividad modulador...