University of North Carolina Ashville Athletics
Former Bulldog Kaitlyn Eckert Develops New Chemical Process
06.20.2016 | Women's Soccer
ASHEVILLE, N.C. - Former UNC Asheville student-athlete Kaitlyn Eckert has put her chemistry degree to good use in the professional world as she embodies the athletic department's motto of “Champions in Athletics, Leaders in Life.” Eckert, who graduated in December 2015 after a four-year career with the women's soccer program from 2011-2014, has her name in the Bulldog record books for her play; now she is making a name for herself in the scientific community, as well, making groundbreaking developments in the field of lipidomics.
Eckert, who now works as an analytical chemist at the University of Texas Southwestern, sits inside the top 10 in the Asheville women's soccer record books in several categories, including sitting atop the single season assist record with nine assists, a record she now shares with rising junior Caroline Houser. She is also tied for the fifth-most career goals in program history (20) and is tied for seventh all-time with 55 total points over her career.
But it may be in the professional world where Eckert has left her biggest mark yet after she created a new way of extracting lipid samples for testing that her colleagues are now calling the K-Series extraction – short for Kaitlyn-Series extraction.
“I was able to find a way to separate the salts in the sample from the glycerides and the phospholipids and then took it a step further and separated the phospholipids from the glycerides, which they hadn't been able to do previously,” Eckert stated.
“Now we can send them through the instrument for analysis separately which has allowed for the detection of more lipids as well as increasing the accuracy of the results. A number of people in the molecular genetics department now use it to produce results that are publishable whereas they may have missed things or had been getting less accurate results before.”
Eckert's work in the field of lipidomics at UT Southwestern is something not many other research facilities are doing. Lipidomics is a way of measuring lipid levels within the body. This becomes important when it comes to cholesterol levels or levels of glycerides and phospholipids that can be associated with a number of diseases. Most of these diseases can't be diagnosed or treated without accurate testing of lipids.
“The previous process was a two phase lipid extraction that extracted the lipids but didn't separate things like glycerides from things like phospholipids,” Eckert added. “The problem with this is that when you go to measure them using an mass spectrometry instrument, the signals interfere with each other through a process called ion suppression, because there is simply too much being pushed through at once for the instrument to detect it all.”
Eckert's new three-way extraction method allows researchers to not only separate the salts in the sample from the glycerides and the phospholipids, but now also separates the phospholipids from the glycerides, which hadn't been possible prior to the K-Series.
“I had the pleasure of mentoring Kaitlyn in her undergraduate research project at UNC Asheville and was impressed with her determination,” said Sally Wasileski, associate professor of chemistry at UNC Asheville. “Her research, using computational methods to investigate bond cleavage over metal surfaces, was especially challenging at first. But she persevered with a lot of hard work and systematic investigation.
"This is why she is so successful in her current work in lipid separation - Kaitlyn is a problem solver. I couldn't be more proud of her for this accomplishment.”
“It is kind of a big deal I guess,” Eckert laughed. “It's only a few steps so it's extremely simple and user friendly. It can also be programmed onto a robot so pretty soon it won't even require a human to do it which saves time, and in the research world time is definitely money. The coolest part is obviously that they named it after me. They always say you know it's a big deal when someone else names something after you.”
