BIOS 419: Exploring Nature's Chemistry: Extracting and Interpreting Chemical Profiles for Biosciences

Course Description

Analysis of volatile and semi-volatile compounds provides a fast and powerful tool to understand how chemical profiles of organisms change with specific conditions. Gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS) can be used to separate and characterize chemical profiles of different organisms, extracted in vivo or preserved in tissue samples. However, tools to analyze reproducible datasets have advanced only in the last decade. In this course, students will learn how to design extraction procedures aligned to specific biological questions, and receive hands-on experience analyzing GC-MS data using the Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) analysis infrastructure, a free open-source tool.