The 4th Annual Canadian Metabolomics Conference (CanMetCon) was held at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake on June 15th–16th. This year’s conference was set to be an exciting and in-depth look on current topics in metabolomics and exposomics – focusing specifically on advancing the understanding of exposures in Medicine, Agriculture/Food/Cannabis, Environment/Industrial Settings, and Clinical Applications.
Oral Presentation Winners:
- First Place: Jacqueline Burton “Investigating salivary thiocyanate as a biomarker of cannabis and tobacco use patterns by capillary electrophoresis”
- Second Place: Shuang Zhao “Development of a High-Coverage and Quantitative Metabolomics Assay for Targeted Analysis of Multiple Pathways”
- Third Place: Kieran Tarazona Carrillo “Exposomics of crab gills and algae samples from Caribbean aquatic ecosystems”
Poster Presentation Winners:
- First Place: Ryland Giebelhaus “Profiling and Characterizing the Volatile Exposome with Wristband-Based Passive Samplers and GC×GC-MS”
- Second Place: Tingting Zhao “De Novo Cleaning of Chimeric MS/MS Spectra for LC-MS/MS-Based Metabolomics”
- Second Place: Dipanjan Bhattacharyya “Design of a portable, inexpensive, color based, user friendly metabolomics platform and its application in cancer screening and animal pregnancy”
Jacqueline Burton
My name is Jacqueline and this coming fall, I will be going into my fifth and final year of the Chemical Biology Co-op undergraduate program at McMaster University. For a long while, I didn’t know where my specific interests lay within chemistry, but when it came to deciding if I was going to complete an undergraduate thesis during my fourth year, I remembered the research of Dr. Britz-McKibbin from a second-year analytical chemistry course he taught that I took. I became especially interested in separation science and how it relates to public health, and that public advisements for what people should consume and expose themselves to should be backed up by exact, robust scientific evidence. My lab is currently collaborating with the Population Health Research Institute on the PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological Study) study, and I am in the process of data processing over 2000 samples.
Title of Presentation: Investigating thiocyanate as a biomarker of cannabis and tobacco smoking patterns
What is the key point or highlight that you want the audience to take away from your presentation?
Using cannabis products of any nature (flower, vape, or edibles) will significantly increase your salivary thiocyanate (SCN-) concentration, but as far as my research goes, thiocyanate cannot definitively distinguish which sort of cannabis products you are using.
Can you summarize your presentation in a 30-second elevator pitch?
Prolonged cannabis use can lead to cannabis use disorder, and with the high rates of adolescent use in Canada, this must be monitored within the population. It was thought that since hydrogen cyanide which gets metabolized to the less toxic thiocyanate in the body is produced from the combustion reaction of tobacco smoke, that thiocyanate could also be produced via the same mechanism from cannabis smoke. It was found that salivary thiocyanate increases with both cannabis and tobacco use and is dose-responsive to the amount of tobacco smoked, but not to the amount of cannabis consumed. Salivary thiocyanate also doesn’t show a significant difference from different cannabis use methods such as smoking, vaping and ingesting.
Where do you think the future of the technology lies? What is the next step?
I believe CE-UV (capillary electrophoresis coupled to UV detection) can continue to be a great targeted separation technique if similar technology such as CE-MS doesn’t overshine it. I personally think CE is underrated, as CE-UV has many advantages such as low waste, low sample volume and materials required, high precision and sensitivity, high customizability and efficiency, making it a great fit for studies requiring quantification of just a handful of metabolites. A drawback is it is difficult to identify truly unknown compounds in untargeted analyses. It also may not be appropriate for larger scale studies. Continuing to use CE-UV for small scale, targeted epidemiological studies, for example, evaluating if nitrate (NO3-), a UV absorbable anion, is a suitable biomarker for stress response in humans, would be a great use of the machine and it definitely has the ability to make significant discoveries in the future keeping its disadvantages in mind.
Shuang Zhao
Dr. Shuang Zhao obtained his B.Sc. degree in Chemical Biology from Tsinghua University, China in 2011 and Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from University of Alberta, Canada in 2018, under the direction of Professor Liang Li. After that he joined The Metabolomics Innovation Centre as research scientist and Nova Medical Testing Inc. as the Vice President.
His research focuses on developing innovative LC-MS-based metabolomics and lipidomics solutions. Specifically, he developed 4-channel chemical isotope labeling LC-MS methods, which feature high coverage analysis with outstanding quantification ability for metabolomics analysis. By applying these cutting-edge analytical techniques, he is working on developing novel solutions for clinical metabolomics/lipidomics analysis, and global biomarker discovery for medical and health diagnostic applications.
Title of Presentation: Development of a High-Coverage and Quantitative Metabolomics Assay for Targeted Analysis of Multiple Pathways
What is the key point or highlight that you want the audience to take away from your presentation?
A high-coverage and quantitative metabolomics assay targeting multiple pathways was developed, which can be used for various research needs and areas.
Can you summarize your presentation in a 30-second elevator pitch?
We developed a high-coverage and quantitative metabolomics assay targeting multiple pathways. Two major innovative components of this assay are chemical isotope labeling LC-MS technique and IsoMS Dual processing approach. The assay can be applied to different types of samples for various research purposes.
Where do you think the future of the technology lies? What is the next step?
As our assay has its unique technology and advantages, we envisage that it could contribute to the methodology development in the metabolomics community and benefit various research areas in other fields. We are going to render this assay as a robust and high-performance service solution to all members in the communities.
Kieran Tarazona Carrillo
Kieran is a PhD candidate in the Harynuk TMIC node at the University of Alberta. In 2019 they obtained their Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of Waterloo where they were introduced to the world of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC´GC). Kieran is interested in studying the interplay between the microbiome and human health, with a particular interest on the effects of the gut microbiome on mental health as wells as the skin microbiome and how it is influenced by different skincare products. Their current research focuses on the development of fecal collection and metabolite stabilization technologies in collaboration with DNA Genotek. Additionally, they are studying symbiotic relationships of crabs and environmental exposures with algae from the French Caribbean environments in collaboration with researchers from the University of the Antilles.
Title of Presentation: Exposomics of crab gills and algae samples from Caribbean aquatic ecosystems
What is the key point or highlight that you want the audience to take away from your presentation?
Finding an effective way to remediate the chlordecone contamination in the Caribbean is of utmost importance as this pesticide is harmful and persists even decades after it stopped being used. Using comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC´GC-TOFMS) for metabolomics can help us towards achieving this by enabling us to study the complex metabolomes of marine organisms and identify the impacts this pesticide has on them.
Ryland Giebelhaus
Ryland is currently a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Alberta and TMIC in Dr. James Harynuk’s group. He completed his BSc (Hons.) at UBC Okanagan, where he studied phytohormone metabolism in Dr. Susan Murch’s laboratory. Ryland is currently interested in using mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to explore physiology and how organisms interact with their environment. Ryland research focuses on combining bench top analysis with novel computational and chemometric approaches to better use metabolomics. Currently, Ryland uses comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC×GC-MS) to probe metabolism and environmental exposures. Specifically, Ryland is using GC×GC-MS to explore maternal-infant interactions. Ryland has authored multiple papers on metabolomics, data processing, and chemometrics. Ryland received the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Canadian Graduate Scholarship – Masters (CGS-M) in 2021 at the beginning of his graduate studies, and just received the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) CGS-D in April 2023.
Title of Presentation: Profiling and Characterizing the Volatile Exposome with Wristband-Based Passive Samplers and GC×GC-MS
Dipanjan Bhattacharyya
Dr. Dipanjan Bhattacharyya earned his PhD from the Department of Chemistry, University of Alberta in 2012 in the field of Synthetic Organic Chemistry. He worked in the field of total synthesis of natural products and synthetic methodology. Before joining TMIC, he worked as a Research Scientist in the field of drug designing and synthesis. He has worked for TMIC as a Research Associate for more than five years. His main research is focused on colourimetric assay developments in bio-fluids. He has been working on the novel colourimetric assay developments of CRC biomarkers in human urine samples as part of an NIH funded project.
Title of Presentation: Design of a portable, inexpensive, color based, user friendly metabolomics platform and its application in cancer screening and animal pregnancy
What is the key point or highlight that you want the audience to take away from your presentation?
The poster shows the design of a novel, inexpensive colour-based metabolomics platform for in-clinic cancer screening (CRC) and in-field sheep pregnancy and litter size detection. We have developed novel colourimetric assays of biomarkers in human urine or sheep serum samples which can quantify the metabolites within the 0.25 µM to 25 mM range. The assays require extensive cleaning of the bio-fluids to minimize the matrix effect and enrichment of the metabolite concentrations to improve the limit of detection (LOD); these steps were achieved using ion-exchange chromatography among other techniques. A platform was designed to automate all of the assay chemistry and cleaning steps using custom 3D printed parts and off-the-shelf components. The platform also includes an RGB sensor to measure the colour and accurately report the results. This portable and time-efficient platform aims to be a replacement of NMR and MS-based techniques which are expensive and more time consuming.
Can you summarize your presentation in a 30-second elevator pitch?
Metabolites can act as key biomarkers for various diseases and biological conditions. We have developed a unique metabolomics platform to quantify metabolites colourimetrically, which aims to be a replacement for more expensive or time-consuming assay techniques. The development of the platform has two distinct aspects: 1) development of novel colourimetric chemical or enzymatic assays (e.g. N1, N12-diacetylspermine) and 2) design of an automated platform to perform all the chemistry steps along with a Red/Green/Blue (RGB) colour sensor for colourimetric measurements. The two key ongoing projects highlighted using this platform are: 1) screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) based on an in-clinic urine test and 2) a test to determine sheep pregnancy and litter sizes in farms. Overall, the development of these two projects that are so disparate in application and execution demonstrates the utility and versatility of this metabolomics sensor platform.
Where do you think the future of the technology lies? What is the next step?
User-friendly assay kits are designed for in-clinic (cancer screening) or in-field (sheep pregnancy and litter size) testing. A pilot study for the in-clinic CRC screening is currently in progress in Nigeria and we are getting very promising and consistent results. We are planning to conduct a large scale study in the near future. With the ability to integrate any required colourimetric assay chemistry steps into this automated platform and the sensitivity with which the colour sensor can measure the data, we will be able to modify and utilize this platform for the quantitative detection of other biomarkers of various diseases for e.g. maple syrup urine disease, phenylketonuria, polyps and different types of cancer etc.
