AGILENT CASE STUDY: Empowering Researchers

LAYING THE GROUNDWORKAGILENT AIDS CREATION OF NEW METHODSIN METABOLOMICS

Stephan Hann isn’t trying to cure cancer, but he is oneof many scientists around the world who are contributing
their expertise in diverse fields in order to understand thecomplex, interrelated aspects of biology.
Dr. Hann is responsible for metabolomic analysis at the University of Natural Resourcesand Life Sciences in Vienna. He also leads the core metabolomics facility at the Austrian
Center of Industrial Biotechnology, where he and his colleagues collaborate with someof the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.
Their goal: build better methods to quantify metabolites.
“Our collaboration partners from biotech are using our results to optimize their processes,”Hann says, “to increase their yields and improve the quality of their products.”

Stephan Hann, Ph.D.

Analytical Chemist
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences,
ViennaFor biotech companies, the products include complex recombinant proteins usedin biomedical applications. For Hann and his fellow researchers, the products arevalidated methods.
They rely on Agilent instruments— most notably the Agilent 7200 quadrupole
time-of-flight system—to develop their methods. The world’s first Q-TOF
designed specifically for GC/MS, this instrument delivers high sensitivity
and selectivity, plus accurate-mass and high-resolution information forstructural confirmation.
“We are publishing new separation methods, new detection concepts, and new data
evaluation concepts,” he says.
A pure analytical chemist, Hann sees his work as part of a process of continuous
improvement and optimization taking place throughout the global scientific community.
“One of the challenges is that we want to analyze more samples in less time, so wealways aim to develop methods that are less time consuming,” he says.

AGILENT CASE STUDY: Empowering Researchers

Hann notes that, fortunately, the university has a longstanding
relationship with Agilent, and the company is often able to adapt
its software to meet the needs of researchers in emerging fields.

Although metabolomics is hardly a new science, it is still in its infancy compared to disciplines
such as genomics and proteomics, which have enjoyed heightened focus in recent years.
“We have many, many different compounds, and metabolomics tools are not so advanced
that we can put everything into the software and the software brings us the final result,”
he says. “It’s a lot of manual work.”
Hann notes that, fortunately, the university has a longstanding relationship withAgilent, and the company is often able to adapt its software to meet the needsof researchers in emerging fields.
“Metabolomics is emerging as a very important area of research—comparable to whereproteomics was several years ago,” he says. “I am confident that we will end up with thekind of well-developed data evaluation tools they have now in proteomics.”
More specifically, Agilent is contributing to Hann’s work in metabolic flux analysis, anexperimental technique designed to examine the production and consumption rates ofmetabolites in a biological system.
“We are developing and implementing GC/MS- and LC/MS-based methods to analyze
important metabolites of the central carbon metabolism,” Hann says. “We are performing
targeted quantitative measurements via LC/MS/MS and GC/MS/MS, and we are using
the novel Agilent 7200 GC/Q-TOF MS to measure the distribution of metabolites of interest.
This will enable us to determine in vivo reaction rates.

To learn more about how
Agilent is striving to meet thecomplex needs of scientists andresearchers around the world,
visit www.agilent.com/
chem/academia
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© Agilent Technologies, Inc. 2014
Published in USA, July 9, 2014
5991-4965EN“We are one of the first groups using the GC/Q-TOF in metabolomics, and we are very
happy with the results. We can give our methods to another lab and they will get the same
results we do,” he adds.
“Since this is still an emerging field, we don’t have reference materials. Nobody knows:
What is the real content of these cells? To see that we are able to produce comparable data
between different labs—this was a real milestone for us. It is especially gratifying to seethat the methods we have developed and the data we are producing is beneficial to thebiotechnology industry.”