Swedish Metabolomics Centre

Swedish Metabolomics Centre (SMC; www.swedishmetabolomicscentre.se) was launched 2013 via an infrastructure grant from Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation and co-funding from Umeå University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Chalmers Technical University. From 2016 SMC is a part of SciLifeLab. SMC is located in Umeå with an additional lab at Chalmers, Göteborg mainly focused on modelling. The main aim of the centre is to support the researchers at Swedish Universities with mass spectrometry based small molecule, lipid and metabolomics analysis in biological tissues and fluids, and furthermore, to become a leading knowledge centre in metabolomics and related areas.

Services

For service requests or questions, contact: info@swedishmetabolomicscentre.se. There is always a meeting between the SMC and the customer, either in person or over the phone or Skype. At these meetings are besides the Head of Facility also SMC’s biostatistician present, and the staff that will perform analyzes. In some cases also the Facility director and/or deputy director is present.

• Untargeted metabolite profiling (metabolomics)
• Targeted metabolite profiling (e.g. amino acids, sugars, fatty acids, TMAO (for details, contact SMC)).
• Targeted lipid profiling (for details, contact SMC).
• Study design
• Method development
• Basic statistics
• Open lab access services

Applications

Metabolites are essential components in all living organisms. It is well known that disorders in metabolite patterns cause metabolic diseases that can have dramatic effects on the survival of the organism. Therefore is measuring metabolites essential in today’s clinical chemistry. In addition to use metabolite profiles for screening of metabolic disorders (clinical chemistry applications), targeted or untargeted profiling of metabolites or lipids are necessary also to understand fundamental biological processes. As metabolites can be considered as “end-points” and closer to the phenotype than e.g. transcript data, metabolite data provides biochemical information that can be linked to particular phenotypes. These links can then be used to connect to gene-, protein- or other meta-data in explorations of targeted biological processes, or also suggested to identify biomarkers.

Equipment

• Mass spectrometers
  • Leco Pegasus BT, GCTOFMS
  • Leco Pegasus HT, GCTOFMS
  • Agilent 7000C, GCQqQMSMS
  • Thermo Scientific LTQ-Orbitrap XL
  • Agilent UHPLC-QqQMSMS 6495
  • Agilent UHPLC-QqQMSMS, 6490 (2)
  • Agilent 6550 iFunnel Accurate-Mass UHPLC-QTOFMSMS (2)
  • Agilent 6560 Ion Mobility UHPLC-QTOFMSMS