Important visit
Seminar about metabolomics
The academic Ian Castro-Gamboa spoke about the development of metabolomics in the framework of his visit to Argentina.
Ian Castro-Gamboa, Ph.D in organic chemistry, specialist in the area of metabolomics and professor and researcher at the Institute of Chemistry of the Paulista State University (IQ-UNESP), Brazil, gave a seminar for the members of the Research Center in Bionanosciences (CIBION), within the framework of a visit to Argentina, where he was a thesis jury.
The researcher focused on explaining how the development of the chemistry of natural products in the São Paulo region (Brazil) is progressing, from a metabolomics perspective and focusing on the main challenges and present and future perspectives.
Castro-Gamboa highlighted some of the main advances of his work team, mainly in Alzheimer's studies and research involving rozospheric fungi, while he acknowledge that in Brazil there is "social pressure to know what you are doing today a scientist today and what are the projections of his work to society.”
Founding member of LAMPS (The Latin American Metabolic Profiling Society), he referred to the challenges of this organization. For example, he considered that there is a need for greater access and equity to information, more facilities to obtain equipment and the existence of open source software and data available to the scientific community.
About the speaker
Ian Castro-Gamboa graduated with honors in Organic Chemistry from the University of Costa Rica (1994) and PhD in Organic Chemistry from the Federal University of São Carlos (2000). He completed a post-doctorate (2000-2002) in the area of electrochemically active compounds, using the HPLC-DEq interface, with the aim of understanding the synergistic relationships between molecules with antioxidant potential in complex natural matrices. He completed an internship abroad (2009-2010) at the University of Florida, USA, working on metabolomics and dereplication techniques using NMR and computational modeling for in situ elucidation of bioactive secondary metabolites. He has experience in the area of Organic Chemistry, with emphasis on evolution, chemosystematics and spectroscopy, working mainly on the following topics: bioactive micromolecules belonging to higher plants and microorganisms (especially those associated with the rhizosphere) and development of dereplication methods using EM and NMR applying metabolomics, bioinformatics and statistical tools for the rational use of Brazilian biodiversity and its conservation. He is currently Coordinator of the NMR Platform, Vice Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Chemistry at IQ-UNESP and founding member of LAMPS - Latin American Metabolic Profiling Society, a network that seeks to strengthen the Latin American scientific community that produces research in metabolomics.