AGILENT CASE STUDY: EMPOWERING RESEARCHERS

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
AGILENT TECHNOLOGY HELPS RESEARCH CENTER
IMPLEMENT MULTI-OMICS APPROACH

Núria Canela’s early research focused on cancer and drug discovery.
She gained experience in a variety of scientific disciplines and analyticaltechniques, but soon realized that each had its limitations.
Then, in 2008, she joined the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Tarragona, Spain.
“That’s when the idea of creating the Center for Omic Sciences began,” Canela says.
“I was in the right place at the right time.”Founded in 2013, the center includes an array of Agilent instruments
and software solutions, and is dedicated to systems biology. That is, acombination of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics.

Núria Canela, PhD
Coordinator
Center for Omic Sciences
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Tarragona, Spain“When I started out, I was focused on one target: new inhibitors then bind to targets
such as CDKs, Cyclins, and so on. But then I thought: To take a big step forward, youneed to see the whole system, not only one protein,” Canela says.
The center, which she coordinates, has enabled her to do exactly what she wanted to
do: expand her perspective.
“We are focusing our research now on nutrition and health, but with the point of view ofapplying all the omics platforms that we can,” she says. “By linking information obtained
from different sciences, we can get a more realistic overview of the biological system weare studying. Further, we combine this knowledge into a final whole picture to elucidate
which pathways are represented or activated in a particular phenotype.”
The microbiome—that diverse collection of bacteria, fungi, and yeasts that reside in ourguts—is of special interest.
“We are investigating the effect of the microbiome’s composition andfunctionality in relation with changes in diet and several disorders, such as
obesity, metabolic syndrome, and inflammatory diseases,” Canela says.
It’s challenging work.

AGILENT CASE STUDY: EMPOWERING RESEARCHERS“We are investigating the effect of the microbiome’s composition
and functionality in relation with changes in diet and severaldisorders, such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, andinflammatory diseases,”“In the microbiome, you are analyzing lots of different microbes mixed together,” Canela says,“so identifying each one is a problem.”Many of the microbes don’t even have names yet.
“First you must describe the diversity of your microbiota with metagenomic approaches,”
Canela says. “When you have a list of the possible species, you construct your database,putting together the proteomes of these species. Then you construct your own proteome
database to do the metaproteomic and metabolomic analysis.”
It’s the “meta” nature of these studies—encompassing all the genes, proteins,and metabolites in the sample—that makes them so challenging.
“That means not only looking at one single change, but looking for patterns,” Canela says.
In other words, how are all these different molecules interacting? Does an increase in one(or two or three) lead to a decrease in another? Such patterns can indicate, for example,
whether adding a new food or ingredient to a person’s diet is having a beneficial effect—beyond basic nutrition—which is another aspect of the center’s research.
Canela notes that the center’s workload is split 50/50 between providing analytical services
for both academia and industry, and also developing its own research projects. She is proud
to point out that, just one year after she joined the center, Spain’s Ministry of Economics andCompetition recognized the Center for Omic Sciences, along with the complementary Center
for Genomic Analysis, in Barcelona, as singular scientific and technological hubs.

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The center is equipped with gas and liquid chromatographs as well as mass spectrometersfrom Agilent—not to mention liquid-handling robots, bioanalyzers, and a microarrayscanner—along with related software for integrating omics data and doing pathway
analysis, namely Agilent MassHunter Mass Profiler Professional and GeneSpring.
“An important partner, Agilent has solutions for the different omics sciences, and this fits invery well with our approach,” Canela says. “These systems facilitate the interpretation andintegration of our results from various techniques, and this is very useful for us.”She notes that the center is also developing new tools and techniques of its own.
“Principally we are focusing on metabolite identification along with novel GC/MS, LC/MS,and NMR approaches,” she says. “We are implementing these in our research and in ourservices as well.”