Research

At the AMRL, the research can be roughly divided into three areas:

Method Development

Method development is vitally important in almost all the scientific areas, as one decisive difference between human and animal beings is learning to use tools. At the AMRC, we use MS to:

expand the coverage of detectable metabolites;
carry out quantitative metabolomics;
perform comprehensive metabolic flux analysis.

Mechanisms

Metabolomics is a relatively new area in systems biology. Beyond genes and proteins, metabolite markers provide an complementary and promising approach to investigate mechanisms related to various biological processes. At the AMRC, typical mechanism projects include the studies of :

Metabolism alterations in C. elegans under hypoxic preconditioning;
Myc-regulated metabolic reprogramming during tumorigenesis (with Dr. Robert N. Eisenman, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center);
interactions between dietary nutrition and gut microbiome (with Dr. Julia Yue Cui, University of Washington)

Translational Sciences

Afterall, our research aim is to improved human health, using metabolomics alone or in combination with other approaches. The related studies include, but are not limited to:

nutrition biomarkers that link human health and diet (with Dr. Carol Johnston, ASU);
metabolomics diagnosis and therapy monitoring of cancer (with Dr. Douglas Lake, ASU)