Seminar, 22. May 2017, Christoph Steinbeck

22. May 2017, 16:15 p.m. – Monday

Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2; seminar room 3423

Global, open data management and analysis in metabolomics

Prof. Dr. Christoph Steinbeck
(Analytical Chemistry – Cheminformatics and Chemometrics, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena)

Metabolomics has become an important phenotyping technique for molecular biology and medicine. It assesses the molecular state of an organism or collections of organisms through the comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of small molecules in cells, tissues, and body fluids. Metabolic processes are at the core of physiology. Consequently, metabolomics is ideally suited as a medical tool to characterize disease states in organisms, as a tool to assess organisms for their suitability in, for example, renewable energy production or for biotechnological applications in general. In addition, application of metabolomics in environmental science, toxicology, food and medical industry is well established, growing and documented. Metabolomics studies generate large amounts of analytical data (Giga- to Terabytes depending on the size of the study) and therefore impose significant challenges for biomedical and life science e-infrastructures to cope with such data volumes and ensure that the data is captured, stored and disseminated. Over the past ten year, we have developed MetaboLights one of the global core repositories for metabolomics data, led standardisation efforts and established a world-wide network for metabolomics data exchange. Currently, we are developing PhenoMeNal, the first European e-infrastructure for large scale computing with big metabolomics data.