General context

Metabolomics provides a functional readout of the cells biochemistry. It holds great potential to link the observed differences in the phenotype to the underlying biochemical and molecular mechanisms.

The Metabolomics Core at VIB consists of two platform sites, located in Ghent and Leuven. Both sites provide contemporary mass spectrometry (MS) based metabolomic services and offer customized solutions for your experimental setup if requested.

The site in Ghent is embedded in the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology and specializes in secondary metabolism. By constructing a unique in house library with over 5000 secondary metabolites, the team developed a high throughput pipeline for comparative (untargeted) metabolic profiling. The introduction of Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry and the use of advanced data processing software (including basic statistics) ensures a straightforward and high quality data output. Additional characterization through compound purification and NMR analysis are also available, but optional.

All services are open to the VIB community, academic researchers and industry. We are always willing to assist you in formulating biological conclusions, if needed. To always ensure a high quality service, we constantly invest in the following up and implementation of novel and cutting-edge techniques for metabolomics.

    Services

The Ghent platform

The Metabolomics Core provides mass spectrometry-driven metabolomics, and our services include, but are not limited to:

• SOPs for experiment setup
• Comparative metabolic profiling (High Resolution UPLC-IMS-MS and High Resolution GC-MS)
• High throughput statistical data analysis (including PCA, ANOVA, LIMMA, Volcano-plot analysis, heatmap) for differential analysis
• Compound identification by matching internal spectral databases (in-house: PhytoComp, NIST20) for GC-MS and LC-MS, external databases is optional
• Compound purification through our AutoPurification System
• de novo identification through NMR (optional)

Instrumentation

The Metabolomics Core has immediate access to the following state-of-the-art (High Resolution & Accurate Mass) mass spectrometers:

• Acquity UPLC-Vion HDMS Qtof (Waters)
• Acquity UPLC-PDA-SynaptXS HDMS Qtof (Waters)
• GC-MS 7250 Qtof (Agilent)
• Acquity UPLC-PDA-LTQ Ion Trap (Thermo Scientific) (low resolution)
• Autopurification System (Waters)
• Acquity UPLC-FLR detector (Waters)

VIB-MCG general workflow