What is CEMBIO
The Centre of Metabolomics and Bioanalysis (CEMBIO) at the Faculty of Pharmacy (CEU-San Pablo University) is supervised by Prof. Coral Barbas
CEMBIO is devoted to innovative, top level research work in the metabolomics field, which requires extensive knowledge in chromatography, mass spectrometry (MS) and biostatistics.
Metabolomics is a new approach to study a biological situation without any preliminary hypothesis. Ideally, it is the study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind, specifically of their small molecule metabolite profiles. In practice, we work by differential analysis of sample profiles (metabolic fingerprinting). In summary, analytical techniques are employed to develop as many signals as possible from a sample (urine, plasma, cell cultures, tissue extracts…) as intact as possible. Profiles of the samples from the situation under the study and the corresponding controls are compared by applying multivariate data analysis and those signals significantly different in both groups are identified as candidate markers.
These signals are later submitted to structural elucidation to have tentative markers that should be validated. This approach has experience and explosion in interest from a variety of disciplines ranging from basics biology to all kind of clinical applications and even in food sciences. Researchers are now utilizing the power of metabolomics to examine underlying biology and mechanism of disease, for drug development¸ toxicity studies, for the identification of disease diagnostic and prognostic markers and even for assessing the effects of environmental changes.
CEMBIO has capacity of tackling aspects such as experimental designs, analytical methods, appropriate statistical methods for metabolomics and biochemical interpretation.
Analytical Capabilities
- Sample preparation of all kind of biological samples: biofluids, cells, tissues, faeces
- Targeted and untargeted metabolomics studies in clinical and basic research with different analytical tools: GC-MS, CE-MS, LC-MS
- Data mining
- Metabolite identification
- Pathway analysis and biological interpretation
