Metabolomics, science, and connections in South America

While Estonia was celebrating a sunny and warm Jaanipäev, Pilleriin travelled to wintery Argentina to attend the Metabolomics Society Conference and visit research labs in snowy Patagonia.

This year’s Metabolomics Society Conference — already the 22nd in the series — was held for the first time in South America, in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires. The conference is one of the key events in the field and brings together around 500 participants. Over four days, the programme featured inspiring presentations from society members, early-career researchers, and major sponsors, including Thermo Fisher, Shimadzu, Agilent, Bruker, Sciex, and many others.

Pilleriin presenting at Patagonia

Pilleriin also contributed with an oral presentation in the Environmental session, where she introduced her compound class vector method. This approach enables chemically meaningful comparison and characterisation of complex metabolomics datasets.

Before the conference, she travelled to southern Argentina to visit laboratories in Patagonia. At the Instituto Andino Patagónico de Tecnologías Biológicas y Geoambientales in San Carlos de Bariloche, research ranges from developing novel yeast strains for the local beer and whisky industry to studying unique lake dynamics at nearby lakes. In addition to learning about their work, Pilleriin gave a presentation to local researchers, opening discussions for future collaborations in metabolomics-related projects.

Next year’s Metabolomics Society Conference will take place in Daegu, South Korea! So if interested, keep an eye on the Metabolomics Society Webpage and LinkedIn.

Paleoproteomics course by visiting Professor Matthew Collins

Prof. Collins (left) with the students demonstrating the working principles of mass spectrometry

From the 17th to the 21st of March, the Archemy group welcomed Professor Matthew Collins, a Professor of Paleoproteomics at University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, at University of Tartu for a week-long paleoproteomics course.

The course, attended by students and researchers from University of Tartu and the Collège de France, covered the fundamentals, methods, and applications of ancient proteomic studies using both MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry and LC-MS/MS.

Since the attendees’ backgrounds varied from archaeologists to chemists and geneticists, the course began with a review of the fundamentals of organic chemistry. Masterfully, Prof. Collins continued with an introduction to mass spectrometry and a method called ZooMS – zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, which is based on detecting marker peptides to determine animal taxonomy.

Students participating in the course

The course continued with an intensive introduction to analyzing the paleoproteome using LC-MS/MS and the opportunities it provides in analyzing ancient ways of life, for example, determining the species used for dairy production. However, the shortcomings of the methods were also discussed. In archaeological material, the most prevailing issues tend to be contamination with modern and more abundant proteins, as well as the deamination of amino acids due to their advanced age. Despite the difficulties in analyzing ancient proteomes, the debates on the final day still concluded that the methods are highly applicable in archaeological studies.

Prof. Matthew Collins led the intensive course within the project PaleoMIX: Nurturing Heritage Science with Novel Bioarchaeological Methods in the Eastern Baltics, PI Mari Tõrv (UT). Project partners include the University of Copenhagen, the University of Burgos, and the University of York.

Read more about paleoproteomics and its applications in an interview with Prof. Collins (in Estonian).

The cultural heritage investigation workgroup published the first Tutorial Review article about lasers!

The analytical chemistry scientists (Dr Signe Vahur, Dr Anu Teearu-Ojakäär, Prof Ivo Leito) together with physicists (Dr Rünno Lõhmus, Dr Aleksei Treshchalov, Prof Jaak Kikas) from the Institute of Physics at the University of Tartu and conservation scientists at the Estonian Academy of Arts (Prof Hilkka Hiiop, MSc Käthi Niman), have published a new tutorial review article, “Laser-based analytical techniques in cultural heritage science – Tutorial review“ in the journal of Analytica Chimica Acta. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aca.2023.342107.

Graphical abstract in the journal of Analytica Chimica Acta (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aca.2023.342107)

This comprehensive collaboration article is significant for the cultural heritage investigation workgroup and the PRG1198 project team, which is currently developing a new laser-based MS system.

The main focus of this tutorial review is to give a simple and accessible overview of the physical background of different lasers, their parameters, and examples of applications in analytical techniques useful for the identification of components of various complex materials from a cultural heritage point of view. Besides conservators and cultural heritage scientists, this review may also interest researchers and students of other fields (e.g., material science, physics, chemistry, forensics, etc.) who wish to know more about lasers.

Sailing and analysis of the historical boat Lodi

An exciting collaboration between analytical chemists, archaeologists, and boat experts occurred recently!

Archemy research group investigated the composition of a mysterious dark coating material from a historical boat called “Lodi”. Our PhD student Shidong used solvent extraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to understand the composition of the coating.

As it turns out, the ship was covered by a mixture of coal and pine tar. Large amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were detected with minor quantities of abietic diterpenoids.

As a thank-you gesture, Archemy group and guests from the analytical chemistry department were invited to sail with the “Lodi” on Emajõgi. We celebrated the beginning of the academic year, looked back on our summer, and made plans for the new academic year.

 

Atmospheric aerosols – Master’s project of Nieves Flores March

This week, Nieves Maria Flores March successfully defended her Master’s thesis named the “Organic Constituents of Atmospheric Aerosols in a Hemi-boreal Forest” and was awarded the highest grade – “A”!

In this project (supervised by Prof. Heikki Junninen), Nieves studied the chemical composition of organic aerosols collected from an Estonian Hemi-boreal forest during winter, spring, and summer. This research is important because atmospheric aerosols play a significant role in climate change and human health. However, the impact of boreal forests is difficult to characterize because of the chemical diversity of aerosol samples. 

To get a better understanding of the chemical composition, Nieves applied two analytical methods – gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to the forests samples. For data analysis, she used a molecular networking technique to tentatively identify the possible compounds. She concluded, that the developed set of methods has great potential to perform fast screening of the chemical composition of atmospheric aerosols. 

The GC-MS and NMR analyses were performed in collaboration with our Chair of Analytical Chemistry and we are happy to say that this joint and fruitful project will also continue in the future. 

Congratulations to you, Nieves!

 

Guests from Mülheim learning our pKa measurement method

Starting from last week the Analytical chemistry group of University of Tartu has the pleasure to host Dr Monika Lindner and Hendrik van Thienen from the group of professor Benjamin List – a worldwide known guru in the field of strongly acidic catalysts working at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung (Mülheim, Germany).

The purpose of their stay is to learn our pKa measurement method and set it up in Mülheim. This is the logical continuation of our group’s collaboration with the List group – the pKa values of a number of their catalysts have been measured here at Tartu (see Nature Chemistry 2018, 10, 888-894 and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, 56, 1411-1415) – and we are glad that our pKa measurement method thereby gains even wider acceptance than it has now. We wish Monika and Hendrik all the success in learning the measurements!

(On the photo, from left: Märt Lõkov, Monika Lindner and Hendrik van Thienen)