National course. It is addressed to students at master- and PhD level as well as postdocs that works or will work with combined chromatography (GC and LC) and mass spectrometry, as well as  current and potential facility users such as PhD students, postdocs, group leaders and core facility staff within all Swedish universities, interested in metabolomics and proteomics.

This course is supported by SciLifeLab and run by the SciLifeLab Swedish Metabolomics Centre in Umeå.

Registration page

Registration and questions

Application deadline: February 2

Responsible teacher: Thomas Moritz, UPSC/SMC; thomas.moritz@slu.se

Course dates

Module 1: February 19-23
Module 2: March 19-23

Course content

The goal of the course is to enable the students to understand more of the theoretical and practical aspects of various combinations of chromatography and mass spectrometry commonly used in metabolomics analysis. It is addressed to students at master- and PhD level as well as postdocs that works or will work with combined chromatography (GC and LC) and mass spectrometry. It is also of interest to those who are using and obtaining results from metabolomics and proteomics service platforms.

Teaching: Oral lectures; group work; discussion of results from group work; home work; present results from home work.

Topics covered will include:

• Basic chromatographic theory
  • The separation and band broadening processes
  • Chromatographic terms
  • Adapting to rules from regulatory bodies (FDA, EMA, Eur Pharmacopoeia)
• Introduction to Gas Chromatograpy (GC)
  • Carrier gases
  • Application of chromatographic theory in GC
  • Injection techniques in GC
  • Columns in GC
• Introduction to Mass spectrometry (MS)
  • MS- how does it work?
    • Ion source
    • Mass analyser
    • Detector
  • MS-instrumentation
    • Mass range
    • Accuracy
    • Resolution
  • The EI- ion source. EI spectra
    • Obtaining information from EI-MS spectra (Ii)
    • The use of GC-MS to obtain EI-MS spectra
    • GC-MS and quantitative analysis
• Introduction to Liquid Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS)
  • Instrumentation in LC-MS
  • The application of Chromatographic theory in LC
  • Instrumentation for LC-MS
    • The ESI- ion source
    • Obtaining ESI spectra for different purposes
    • ESI spectra and libraries
    • Interpretation of ESI-LC-MS spectra
    • LC-MS quantitative analysis
  • Validation of quantitative analysis
    • The design of a validation plan
    • The validation processes
• GC-MS and LC-MS in metabolomics

Approved course corresponds to 6 HTC

Examination

In order to be approved, the student must be part of the group work and presentations, and approved homework, oral or written.