Ruth Welti
Director of the Kansas Lipidomics Research Center
Link to faculty page: Welti, Ruth
Ruth is originally from northern Connecticut where she graduated from the University of Connecticut with a B.S. in Chemistry. There she worked in the synthetic organic chemistry lab of Samuel Huang. She moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where, after a year as a technician in the blood coagulation lab of Craig Jackson, she earned a Ph.D. in David Silbert's lab. There, she semi-synthesized and characterized, using fluoresence spectroscopy, parinaroyl phospholipid probes of membrane structure. As a postdoctoral trainee in George Helmkamp's lab at the University of Kansas Medical Center, she analyzed phospholipid transfer proteins and their lipid associations. Her research program at Kansas State began by analyzing membrane lipid physical states and lipid-lipid interactions in model systems and E. coli. After a brief sojourn into animal systems, she became a plant biologist and mass spectrometrist in about 2000. Along with Sam (Xuemin) Wang, she started the Kansas Lipidomics Research Center in 2003. Currently, Ruth directs KLRC, which performs mass spectrometry (MS)-based analysis of intact complex lipids, as well as simple lipids.
The goal of Ruth's research is understanding the role of signaling and structural membrane lipids in plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses and identifying the role of genes and their lipid products in those responses. Her interests in plant lipids include oxidized lipids, head group-acylated lipids, and just about any usual or unusual complex lipids!