Setting Goals & Expectations
What is your field of interest?
- Skin Health & Cosmetics
- Disease Biomarkers
- Drug Response Biomarkers
- Cellular Metabolism
- Fermentation & Cell Cultures
- Food & Beverage
- Future Foods
- Agriculture
- Microbiome
What are your goals?
- Inventory of metabolites
- Flavor content and nutrient content
- Bioactive amines
- Biomarker discovery, disease markers, and treatment markers
- Cell growth indicators
- Distinguishing bacterial metabolites
From your field of interest and your metabolomics goals, we can design the right project plan and services to meet your needs.
Project Plan
We offer many service options that can be focused on specific areas of interest
- C-SCOPE – A preselected list of 115 metabolites for the quantitative analysis of the glycolytic pathway, TCA cycle, Urea cycle, Pentose phosphate pathway and ATP/ADP/AMP – generally used for measuring cellular metabolism for cancer research and mitochondrial research. This platform is pften used in conjunction with F-SCOPE.
- F-SCOPE measures C13 and N15 heavy atom labeled reagents and their products, most often using labeled glucose or glutamine to study cellular metabolism. C-SCOPE may also be used to study heart or skeletal muscle or any type of cell e.g. neuronal cells for glucose metabolism.
- Basic Scan / OMEGA Scan – our CEMS options measure polar metabolites. With a library of over 2500 polar metabolites, these CEMS untargeted approaches are typically used for biomarker discovery and mechanism of action studies. Basic Scan is a cost-effective way to start measuring the abundant metabolites in plants and in the food technology industry, while the more sensitive OMEGA Scan provides a deeper and more extensive inventory for biomarker discovery. Either service can be used for untargeted metabolomics and any sample type.
- Basic LC / OMEGA LC / MSCAN – our LCMS options measure lipids and non-polar metabolites in multiple sample types. The Basic LC is a reverse phase method, untargeted, that measures the most abundant lipids (steroids, bile acids, fatty acids, carotenoids) in variety of sample types. The OMEGA LC is a similar chromatographic service, however, uses the Q-Exactive Plus, and is therefore more sensitive than the Basic LC, providing a large untargeted lipid profile. MSCAN is a targeted list of 400 lipid mediators (lysophospholipids, fatty acids, ceramides, sphingomyelins) that are involved in immune and inflammatory pathways.
- Unique options include: amino acid analysis, D/L amino acid analysis, breath analysis and fit-4-purpose quantitative customized panels using capillary electrophoresis, liquid chromatography or ion chromatography.
- Project size: We have capacity for large projects (over 250 samples), however, we are also able to process small pilot or investigational sized projects using 1 to 6 samples.
Sample Preparation and Shipment
- We have protocols for metabolite extraction from multiple sample types: suspended or adherent cells, tissues, biofluids, fecal matter, plants and much more for both polar and lipid measurements.
- Our lab will work with you to create protocols for novel sample types.
- Human samples will require completion of our biopathogen form to declare any pathogen risk.
- Our preference is to have clients extract cellular metabolites and send us the extracted lysate for analysis. We will provide protocols, filter tubes and internal standard.
- For tissue and solid samples (plant roots, leaves, muscle, cell pellets), we will provide our tissue tubes.
- Samples may be shipped to our Boston office or directly to our lab.
Data Analysis
- With a project plan and metabolite measurements complete, data analysis is at the heart of understanding your data. What are the options? What is your data telling us?
- We offer standard and modified analysis tools to match outcomes to goals from standard TTEST to OPLS-DA, multi variant analysis to batch corrections. We tailor our analysis to your project plan and outcomes.
- Our collaborative spirit is lead by a Scientific Coordinator that will work directly with you and help you understand the data and present their own analysis.
Providing Solutions
- At HMT we want to help bring solutions and hypothesis building results to you by applying flexibility, collaboration and innovation.
- Contact HMT-America today to talk with your Scientific Coordinator.