Liggins Seminar Series: Dr Erica Zarate and Dr George GUO

Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) is an economical, high-throughput technique ideally suited for the analysis of the biological metabolites. Erica and Saras specialize in running and developing GC-MS methods for a wide range of sample types, including microbes, tissues and body fluids. The extraction and analysis methods used are designed to maximise the response for a wide range of metabolites, including amino acids, fatty acids and sugars. This approach can provide a ‘snapshot’ of the cell metabolism at a given phase, treatment, or diseased state. However, screening for hundreds of compounds in thousands of samples produces a large amount of data. Dr. George will cover the capabilities and limitations of GC-MS analysis and current solutions to processing large data sets. Two metabolomics data processing pipeline has been developed to simplify the data handling, quantitation and validation procedure. The parallel pipeline not only provide stable computing output but also incubate innovative normalization and statistical method on metabolomics analysis.

About the speakers:

Erica Zarate is a member of the MaSH committee and holds a MSc and a PhD (Biological Sciences) in lipid and fatty acid analysis of sea urchin gonads using the GC-MS from the University of Auckland. She has been working with GC-MS since 2010, during her PhD and then as a GC-MS technician. Before her PhD, Erica worked as a Research Technician in the Marine Lab at the University of Auckland. Erica provides technical support for metabolomics analysis, sample preparation, calibration and maintenance of GC-MS and GC-MS data processing at the School of Biological Sciences.

George GUO is a Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology. He is focused on computer programing for quantitative proteomics/metabolomics research. He has adaptive computer scripting strategy to provide high-efficient and robust ‘Omics data solution. He is a member of Mass Spectrometry Hub, aimed at improving ‘Omics experiences throughout the university. He holds a PhD degree in Biology from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, focused on the mass spectrometry based quantitative proteomics analysis towards stable isotopic labelled biological sample.