CEU Mass Mediator receives the innovation award by The Analytical Scientist

The bioinformatic tool CEU Mass Mediator (CMM) has received one of 2018 Innovation Awards of the magazine The Analytical Scientist, of the group Texere. It acknowledges the joint work during over five years of the Center of Excellence of Metabolomics and Bioanalysis (CEMBIO) and the Laboratory of Bioengineering (Biolab) of the University CEU San Pablo.

The prestigious scientific publication publishes in its printed version, Web and Ipad application, everything related to analytic chemistry. Its readers were responsible of nominating the finalists. Winners were chosen by independent experts and the editorial staff of The Analytical Scientist.

To date, the identification of metabolites is the main bottleneck in metabolomics experiments. It involves a great amount of manual work from researchers very repetitive which causes frequent errors.

CEU Mass Mediator is a tool to search metabolites in different databases (Kegg, HMDB, LipidMaps, Metlin, MINE and an internal library). It is specially designed to make searches in experimental masses obtained from mass spectrometry techniques. CMM uses artificial intelligence to filter and rank in increasing order of probability the different notes compatible with the data obtained from the mass spectrometry.

Summary of the data processing flow of typical data in the tool.

The heart of the tool is an expert system based on rules which has been conceived by the knowledge of analytic chemists of the CEMBIO. Therefore, it allows the automatic application of the experience gained throughout the years by the members of this investigation team.

CMM is of open source and is available for the public online.

In the picture above; from left to right: Joanna Godzien (main investigator), Coral Barbas (director of CEMBIO and co-director of the creation of this tool with the professor of CEU University San Pablo Abraham Otero) and Alberto Gil (main developer of the tool).