Pre-Conference Satellite Meetings June 28, 2015

  • NSF-JST meeting “Metabolomics for a Low Carbon Society”, RCN chair Dr. Lloyd Sumner
  • Metabolomics hackathon, Dr Christoph Steinbeck / EBI, UK and Dr Emma Schymanski / EAWAG, CH

Conference Workshops June 29, 2015

3 parallel workshop streams:

  1. Technologies e.g. introductory workshops on MS, imaging, NMR and vendor showcase
  2. Early career member network (EMN) topics including career development, genomics
  3. NIH workshops including Common Fund pilot projects

Conference Sessions June 29-July 02, 2015

5 invited keynote speakers (plenary):

  1. Prof. Mike Snyder, Stanford, USA - Genomics and metabolomics for precision medicine
  2. Prof. Anne Osborn, John Innes Center, UK - Plant natural products
  3. Prof. Benjamin Cravatt, Scripps, USA - Activity-based enzyme profiling
  4. Prof. Zoltan Takats, Imperial College, UK - iKnife in clinical applications
  5. Prof. Jie Luo, Huazhong Agricultural University, China - GWAS investigations with metabolomics data

6 invited session speakers:

  1. Dr Andrew Hanson, USA - Theme Area 1 - biological systems
  2. Dr Hannelore Daniel, GER - Theme Area 2 - food and environment
  3. Dr Emma Schymanski, CH - Theme Area 3 - computational analyses
  4. Dr Karsten Suhre, Qatar - Theme Area 3 - human mGWAS analyses
  5. Dr Stan Hazen, USA - Theme Area 4 - human diseases
  6. Dr Tomoyoshi Soga, JP - Theme Area 5 - analytical chemistry

21 oral sessions with 3 parallel sessions. Abstract submission by theme areas, below.

The number and quality of abstracts determine the final number of sessions per theme area.
Six individual scientists have been invited for specific topics; e.g. Drs Andrew Hanson (USA, repair metabolism), Hannelore Daniel (Germany, food metabolomics), Emma Schymanski (Switzerland, cheminformatics), Karsten Suhre (Qatar, human mGWAS analyses), Stan Hazen (USA, cardiovascular health), Tomoyoshi Soga (Japan, CE-MS)

Theme area 1: Utilizing metabolomics to understand complex biological systems

  • Metabolic engineering and Synthetic Biology
  • Control of Metabolic Pathways and Systems Biology
  • The metabolism of the microbiome
  • Use of metabolic pathways in microbial and plant biotechnology and biofuels
  • Ecology interactions using natural products
  • The genetics of metabolism: metabolite QTLs in plant and animal breeding, metabolic-wide association studies, metabolic heredity, epigenetics, enzyme evolution
  • Plant metabolism: climate change and agriculture, metabolism of specific plant cells, metabolism in seed development, plant metabolites in communication and defense
  • The interaction of host/pathogen systems in animal and plant systems

Theme area 2: Exploring the exposome: food and environmental metabolomics

  • What do we eat? Composition of our food and nutrition
  • What is safe? Predicting and measuring toxicological effects of pesticides and xenobiotics
  • What do we store? Analyzing exposures to xenobiotics from chemicals to lifestyle choices
  • What is endogenous? Crossing the boundaries of microbial and multicellular environments

Theme area 3: Computational analysis of metabolic systems

  • Identification and annotation of metabolites by cheminformatics
  • Developing novel databases and libraries in metabolomics and systems biology
  • Integrating Big Data: from data to knowledge
  • Validating data processing workflows
  • Data provenance
  • Improvements in statistical assessments of multivariate data

Theme area 4: The onset, progression and therapy of human diseases

  • Cancer as metabolic disease: from fluxes to metabolic control
  • Metabolic pathways involved in cancer biology
  • Drug response and off-site effects of pharmaceutics
  • The metabolic syndrome: early diagnosis, prevention and patient stratification for CVD
  • The metabolic syndrome: diabetes and therapy effects from exercise to bariatric surgery
  • Neurological disorders: Alzheimer’s, depression, Parkinson’s, autism
  • Precision medicine: from biomarkers to combination of genes to pathway models
  • The use of animal models in understanding human diseases
  • Metabolomics in epidemiology: how to design studies and integrate metadata

Theme area 5: Breaking the limits of metabolomics technologies

  • The metabolic app: miniaturization and metabolic health databases
  • Embracing complexity: glycomics, peptidomics, lipidomics
  • Extending the use of metabolic imaging
  • Separating the metabolome: from CE to multidimensional chromatography and porous-shell columns
  • Advances in mass spectrometry: SWATH and all-ions MS/MS, novel ionization sources, data processing, novel uses of stable isotopes
  • Improvements in quantitation of metabolic signatures
  • Use of isotope labels in metabolomics
  • Advances in analysis of metabolic fluxes
  • Advances in NMR: in-vivo technologies, high-field applications and dynamic nuclear polarization
  • Metabolomics in routine use: Ring Trials and Quality Controls, data normalization, use of internal standards, integration of data sets across technology platforms, reporting standards