51³Ô¹ÏÍø

51³Ô¹ÏÍø researchers represented at the 13th Annual Conference of the Metabolomics Society, held earlier this month in Brisbane, Australia.

Brisbane is city famed for its warm climate and more than 16 bridges that cross the meandering Brisbane River. It was therefore fitting that the theme of this year’s conference was “Building bridges”, which aimed to promote research interactions between systems biology, genome-scale modelling, analytical chemistry and the methods development communities. 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College was well-represented at the conference by various Department of Surgery and Cancer staff and students.

Dr Jia Li, Lecturer in Human Development and Microbial Signalling, was invited to give a keynote presentation on her recent findings examining the systemic impact of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery. Dr Beatriz Jiménez from the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre (directed by Professor Jeremy Nicholson) presented a robust analytical pipeline developed in the National Phenome Centre for high throughput molecular phenotyping studies.

A number of members from Professor Zoltan Takats team were selected to give oral presentations highlighting recent methodological advancements and applications of mass spectrometry methods including Andreas Dannhorn (Spatially resolved profiling of Polymyxin B induced acute kidney injury), Dipa Gurung (Spatial imaging of invasive ductal carcinoma specimens by DESI-MS), Zsolt Bodai (Metabolomic applications of the iKnife and REIMS/MS for in vivo metabolite and tissue identification in breast cancer) and Vincen Wu (Contaminants removal from tissue samples using DESI ion mobility imaging).

Dr Stefano Cacciatore presenting.

Pamela Pruski (co-supervised by Professor Takats and Dr David MacIntyre) talked about her recently developed method for direct medical swab analysis of mucosal samples by DESI MS and Dr Stefano Cacciatore (MacIntyre group) presented updates to his KODAMA algorithm for multivariate modelling of high-dimensional datasets. Finally, Takoua Jendoubi from Professor Robert Glen’s group discussed novel approaches for integrating longitudinal metabonomic and microbiome datasets.

Special congratulations go to Pamela Pruski, Takoua Jendoubi and Dipa Gurung who were awarded Metabolomics Society Student Travel Awards for Outstanding Academic Achievement.

Overall the 13^th Annual Conference of the Metabolomics Society provided an exciting opportunity for attendees to both network with like-minded researchers and to develop an improved appreciation and understanding of cutting edge research currently being undertaken in areas of metabolomics and mathematic modelling of complex metabolic systems.