Mass spectrometry is the Rosetta Stone equivalent to understand the language of our microbiome

Dr. Peter Dorrestein, Professor, University of California at San Diego

November 6, 2018 @ 04:00 pm

Berg Auditorium, 100 Life Sciences Building
University Park

Professor Pieter Dorrestein is a Professor at Skaggs School of Pharmacology and Periatrics; Director, Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center and, Co-Director, Institute for Metabolomics Medicine. His work aims to develop new mass spectrometry-based methods to understand the chemistry of microbes, our microbiome and their ecological niche. His group develops tools that translate the chemical language between cells. His research requires the understanding of microbial genomics, proteomics, image mass spectrometry, genome mining, enzymology, small molecules structure elucidation, bioactivity screening, antibiotic resistance and an understanding of small molecule structure elucidation methods. The collaborative mass spectrometry innovation center that he directs is well equipped and now has twelve mass spectrometers that are used in the studies to investigate capture cellular chatter (e.g. metabolomic exchange), metabolomics, metabolism and to develop methods to characterize natural projects. Areas of recent research directions are capturing mass spectrometry knowledge to understand the microbiome, non-invasive drug metabolism monitoring, informatics of metabolomics, microbe-microbe, microbe-immune cells, microbe-host stem cell-cancer cell interactions and diseased vs non-disease model organisms and the development of strategies for mass spectrometry based genome mining and to detect and structurally characterize metabolites through crowd source annotation of molecular information on the Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking.

Remote viewers can watch the lecture via live-streaming or anytime later at Mediasite.

Contact

Dr. Andrew Patterson
adp117@psu.edu