The CIBION has a new phd

Gabriel Riquelme, a member of the Center for Research in Bionanosciences (CIBION) and the mass spectrometry laboratory of this institute, obtained his PHD after successfully defending his thesis entitled "Development of new methods to automate procedures in metabolomic studies. Application to the diagnosis of prostate cancer”.

Directed by Dr. María Eugenia Monge (researcher in charge of the CIBION mass spectrometry laboratory) and Dr. Pablo Hoijemberg (scientist in charge of the bioanalytical NMR laboratory), Riquelme's thesis addresses a series of challenges using analytical platforms nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS).

In NMR, the development of a methodology based on the spectroscopic total correlation statistics was proposed, which allows improving the tentative annotations of compounds in complex mixtures using databases, focusing especially on cases of spectral regions with overlapping signals. In MS, the developments include new strategies for the detection and extraction of metabolic variables, the development of data curing strategies based on the modeling of the sources of variation observed in them, and their implementation in the TidyMS Python library.

In addition, the research describes the design and execution of a non-directed metabolomic study to improve the diagnosis of prostate cancer through the analysis of serum samples from patients and healthy controls.

It should be noted that metabolomics seeks to characterize and quantify the metabolome in a biological system and determine how it responds to a certain disturbance. From a non-directed metabolomics approach, which involves the detection of the maximum possible number of compounds without knowing their identity a priori, it is possible to isolate and identify those of interest using bioinformatics tools. This scheme of work currently presents various challenges, related to the analytical robustness of the measurements, the confidence in the metabolite annotations, the reproducibility of the results and the time required for the development of the analysis.

¡Congratulations, Gabriel!

More information about the thesis

Directors: Dr. María Eugenia Monge and Dr. Pablo Hoijemberg

Studies Advisor: Dr. José Hodak

Juries: Drs. Ian Castro Gamboa (Assistant Prof., San Pablo State University, Brazil), María Julia Culzoni (Princ. Inv., UNLITORAL, LADAQ, CONICET) and Gabriela Cabrera (Assoc. Prof., COD, FCEN, UBA – Inv. Principal, UMYMFOR, CONICET

Date and place of realization: April 4, 2023 at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA.