Andrés Charris Molina, a CIBION’s PhD fellow and member of the Bioanalytical Nuclear Magnetic Resonance group, defended his thesis for a jury of experts in the Roberto Fernández Prini Classroom of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires.
The presentation was held on Monday June 12 th at 10 am. The thesis student was accompanied by his director, Pablo A. Hoijemberg, CONICET associate researcher, in charge of the aforementioned CIBION laboratory.
The title of the thesis was: "Tools to improve the identification of metabolites in NMR metabolomics using 2D J-resolved spectra." The research focuses on the identification of metabolites in complex biological samples, a challenging task in NMR-based metabolomic studies. In general, most of these studies use 1D 1H spectra as a basis to obtain the information that is later used in the creation of models directed towards the search for compounds that reveal states of metabolic abnormalities in biological systems.
Because they are complex mixtures, the 1D 1H spectra present hundreds of peaks that make identification one of the most difficult and delicate steps in this field. For this reason, searching for new methods that help to minimize the difficulties that identification in highly populated resonance spectra brings is essential. This thesis exposed the creation of new bioinformatics tools aimed at improving the identification of metabolites, offering simplicity and automation.
In the package of tools developed, the following were presented: a database of 1D 1H and 2D J-resolved spectra, an overlapping peak detection method, a peak alignment method and the integration of all these methodologies in one application (installable on Matlab) that we call CIBIONNMRTOOLBOX.
Congratulations on your achievement, Andres!
