Daina Avizonis

Goodman Cancer Research Center, Metabolomics Core facility, McGill

Bio-sketch

Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Daina received her B.S. in chemistry from the University of New Mexico.  She received her PhD in chemical physics at University of California, San Diego.  This was followed with postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco (Department of Pharmacology) and the University of California, Berkeley  (Molecular Cellular biology), where she was a Merck Fellow of the Life Sciences Research foundation.  She then joined Varian Instruments as an NMR applications chemist where she specialized in NMR based automation, flow injection techniques, LC-NMR/MS and metabolomics.  In 2009 she was recruited to the GCRC to start a metabolomics facility with the GCRC’s Oncometabolism group.  The facility provides services to the general research community.

The Seminar:  “GCRC’s Metabolomics Core Facility:  Helping Unravel Cancer Metabolism”

Metabolomics is the comprehensive analysis of metabolites (up to 1500da) that are either metabolic pathway intermediates or end points of biological reactions. As one of the emerging “omics”, it is an area of intense investigation & development in biological sciences ranging from cancer to parasitology. Utilizing a number of technologies such as metabolic cages, Seahorse systems and mass spectrometry, it is possible to probe metabolic behaviors and changes from whole animals, reduced cellular systems.  Further with the use of mass spectrometry these metabolic changes can be analyzed to the level specific metabolic pathway utilization through the measurement of steady state metabolite levels and stable isotope tracer analysis. The metabolomics core facility’s mission is to help researchers from all areas science understand complex and changing metabolic states.  A few success stories, where the facility helped researchers better understand cellular metabolic plasticity, will be described.

Date
Date(s) - December 8, 2015
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Emplacement / Location
Morris and Rosalind Goodman Agora