July, 7, 2015 Seminar Metabolomics data types

The potential of metabolomics and its various data types

Lecturer: Natalie BORDAG,  CBmed – Center for Biomarker Research in Medicine Graz

Abstract: Metabolomics is one of the youngest -omics technologies primarily concerned with the identification and quantification of small molecules (<1500 Da). The specific advantage of metabolomics in biomarker research lies in the concept, that metabolites fall downstream of genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, microbiomic and environmental variation, thus providing the most integrated and dynamic measure of phenotype and medical condition. Thus metabolomics can deliver biologically most valuable results allowing for example early diagnostic biomarkers, optimization of biotechnological productions, gaining deep insights into pathological mechanism, identifying new therapeutic targets and many more. Metabolomics, especially MS (mass spectrometry) based metabolomics, delivers along a the flow from measurement towards knowledge generation highly divers data types with most potential yet to be exploited. The biological potential for knowledge generation by metabolomics will be shown with a real life example. The different data types and common data aggregation (e.g. peak detection, identification), transformations, statistical analysis and visualizations will be shown and open potentials jointly discussed.