Departmental Seminar: Dr. Pieter Dorrestein

Event Date: 11.10.2014 Day: Monday Time: 12:00 pm Location: 601 Fairchild Event Type: Departmental

Department of Pharmacology, Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of California, San Diego

Title: "A community based molecular GPS from microbes to people"

Abstract:

The chemical make-up of biology is incredibly complex. A single host is made up of molecules that come from host cells, microbes, the food they eat, environmental exposure and the same molecules in a variety of metabolized states. As mass spectrometers are becoming faster and more sensitive we can detect a lot of molecular information. There are now mass spectrometers that can analyze 10,000 samples a day. However, there is no infrastructure to analyze this amount of molecular information or to correlate this information to other Big Data generating approaches such as sequencing. On average, however, only 1-5% of all the molecular information that is collected by mass spectrometry can be annotated. There is simply too much information for one person or lab to analyze with the existing tools that are available. In this lecture we will explore the strategies for organizing and visualizing the massive amount of information obtained in mass spectrometry based microbial interactions and microbiome projects. It is critical that this information is digested in intuitive and informative ways. More importantly, we will show how crowd sourcing of the molecular analysis by 1000s of users globally is changing the way this type of data is analyzed. Using these tools we will highlight the molecular and microbial make up of microbial interactions as well as human skin and its impact of xenobiotics, antibiotics and global microbial based specialized metabolism.