Grant: Foundation Grant

Small molecule compounds such as drugs, nutrients and pollutants affect our health in many ways. Nutrients are needed to sustain life, drugs are needed to cure us of illnesses, while pollutants can kill us. Millions of these compounds exist. The complete collection of these compounds is called the "metabolome" -- derived from the word metabolite (a substance produced by metabolism). The study of how the metabolome affects us is called metabolomics. While metabolomics is a relatively new field, scientists have been collecting detailed information about metabolites for ~100 years. Unfortunately, most of this data is scattered in millions of textbooks and journal articles. The lack of centralized databases or electronic resources for metabolomics means that we still know very little about the chemical universe around us. We don't know how many metabolites there are, we struggle to identify or measure them, we don't know where they come from, we can't tell if they are good or bad and we rarely know how they act on our cells or modify our genes. My long-term research goal is to develop the resources needed to address these problems. Using advanced methods in information technology and analytical chemistry, my lab has created a number of databases and software tools that are helping to answer some of these questions. Our plan is to greatly improve these resources by using the latest techniques in artificial intelligence. By using computers to automatically identify and harvest vast amounts of data from the literature and learn from that data, it should be possible to develop far better resources that will allow us to better characterize, predict and exploit the chemical universe around us. This work will not only revolutionize metabolomics, it will greatly accelerate the discovery of new drugs, identify the underlying chemical causes of diseases, enable improved diagnostics and help predict those at risk of developing diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.