Facility managers Dr. Giuseppe Giordano, Dr. Manuela Simonato

Metabolomics provides a functional readout of the cell’s biochemistry. It holds great potential to link the observed differences in the phenotype to the underlying biochemical and molecular mechanisms. The Metabolomics and Lipidomics IRP facility consists of a platform sites, provide by a mass spectrometry (MS) based metabolomic services and offer customized solutions for specific experimental setup. The site in IRP is part of the SDB Department Center for Human Metabolomics and Lipidomics and specializes in primary metabolism. By constructing a unique in house library with over 500 metabolites and over 120.000 from public web data bases of primary and secondary metabolites, the team developed a high throughput pipeline for comparative metabolic and lipidomics profiling. The introduction of Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry and the use of advanced data processing software (including sophisticated data analysis) ensures a straightforward and high quality data output. The site also holds unique expertise in tracer (13C, 2H, etc.) based metabolomics and Lipidomics (target analysis). This technology provides crucial insights into the activity of metabolic pathways by administration of non-radioactive isotopically labeled substrates to the medium (in vitro) or organism (in vivo). The main lines of our research are: development of projection to latent structures regression (PLS) able to explicitly include experimental design, development of new approaches to discover relevant and irrelevant features in PLS models, development of procedures to estimate the power of the PLS models and implementation of the developed procedures using the R platform. Moreover, our team supports users in the design of new experiments and offers a full service for data analysis.
Two laboratories are operational at the IRP: the Mass Spectrometry and Metabolomics Laboratory
(Dr. G. Giordano) and the Pediatric Critical Care Laboratory (Prof. P. Cogo).