The African Centre for Gene Technologies (ACGT) and Metabolomics South Africa (MSA) hosted another successful metabolomics webinar on the 14th of October 2020. This Metabolomics webinar series serves as a platform for discussions on key technologies, techniques or new data analyses that could be of relevance to the rest of the South African metabolomics community.
Professor Justin J.J. van der Hooft, an Assistant Professor at Wageningen University, facilitated a webinar on the challenges of metabolite annotation and identification in untargeted metabolomics experiments of complex mixtures, typically encountered in natural products and food research. Untargeted metabolomics approaches are now widely used, spanning various disciplines including natural products discovery and “foodomics”. This webinar focused on how recently developed tools inspired by natural language processing, facilitate metabolomics analyses.
Prof van der Hooft is currently developing computational metabolomics methodologies to decompose complex metabolite mixtures aided by natural language processing and genomic tools. His interests are in plant- and microbiome-associated metabolites and the food metabolome as prime examples; where expanded knowledge on the specialized metabolome will assist in understanding key metabolic drivers of growth and health.
Similar to previous events, this webinar proved very popular to a diverse audience. It was attended by 102 participants from across South Africa, as well as from some international research institutions. There was a great Q&A session that followed and this highlighted the need for more of these sorts of meetings. The resources for those who wish to enter the field or perform a specific metabolomics application was also highlighted.
For a recording of this webinar, or for more information and suggestions about potential advanced biotechnology-related events, please contact Mr Molati Nonyane at .
The ACGT is looking forward to your participation in future webinars and events.