ECHIDNA - Environmental Cheminformatics to Identify Unknown Chemicals and their Effects (ECHIDNA) - LCSB

ECHIDNA develops computational high resolution mass spectrometry methods for investigating and elucidating unknowns and their influence on health and disease

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Sep 2018
Duration in months:

60
Funding:

Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
Principal Investigator(s):

Emma Schymanski

Paul Wilmes

Carole Linster

Christoph Steinbeck (external)

About

ECHIDNA is a five year ATTRACT fellowship from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) starting late 2018 to build computational methods suitable for investigating and elucidating unknowns and causes of effects using HRMS of small molecules. Computational and experimental developments will improve structure elucidation, including cheminformatics approaches as well as stable and dynamic labelling of samples. New cheminformatics methods will improve our understanding of the fundamentals of HRMS and work towards the “holy grail” of a full Computer- Assisted Structure Elucidation (CASE) system for HRMS.

A microbiome-PD cohort study will yield complex samples with patient/early stage/control information allowing a discovery-based prioritization of potential neurotoxins amongst these samples. Single cell biological systems will yield additional information on known and unknown metabolites in well-understood systems. This project involves several internal partners within LCSB, including the Enzymology and Metabolism Group, Eco-Systems Biology Group and the Bioinformatics Core.