The African Centre for Gene Technologies (ACGT) and Metabolomics South Africa (MSA) are always looking for ways to create more Metabolomics platforms for discussions and training. One such initiative was to start up a Metabolomics Webinar Series that will run throughout 2020. The idea is to have a webinar hosted by a local expert once a month or so to discuss a key technique or new data that could be of relevance to the rest of the South African metabolomics community.
The first webinar of the series was hosted by Dr Shayne Mason on the 9th July 2020 at 14:00. Dr Shayne Mason is from the Laboratory for Infectious Diseases in Human Metabolomics at the North-West University (NWU) Potchefstroom campus. Dr Mason is a research leader at NWU specializing in TB meningitis and biofluid analysis. Dr Mason completed not one, but two BSc degrees; one in Biochemistry and Microbiology and the other in Statistics and Applied Mathematics. He completed his PhD in 2016 as a joint degree between NWU and VU in Amsterdam in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomics. Dr Mason has published over 20 publications in the field and assisted and/or supervised numerous postgraduate students.
Then idea for this webinar was birthed from a question. One of the issues that stood out at a previous ACGT/MSA workshop was “how does one interpret the NMR spectra to determine the metabolites?” This webinar is aimed at answering that question and more.
And Answer it did.
The webinar addressed one of the major challenges in metabolomics which is the identification of metabolites in a highly complex mixture of compounds that produce a forest of peaks in a NMR spectrum. Dr Mason gave a practical stepwise guide description of how to perform 1H-NMR metabolite profiling on multiple complex biological samples. This metabolite identification process, called metabolite profiling, involves fitting the mixture spectrum to a set of individual pure reference spectra obtained from known pure compounds. The fitting process yields not only the identity of the metabolites, but also the accurate concentration of those metabolites. The participants were given a path to successful metabolite profiling that would provide them with a table of metabolite names and their absolute or relative concentrations.
This webinar was attended by 128 participants from all over South Africa. There was a great Q&A session that followed and this highlighted the need for more of these sorts of meetings. Please look out for future communication about the next webinar and other ACGT events.
The ACGT is looking forward to your participation in future webinars and events. For more information and suggestions about future events, please contact Mr Molati Nonyane at .