Professor Roger Linington  will present the Department of Chemistry seminar with a talk entitled, "Integration of Phenotypic and Metabolomic Datasets for the De Novo Prediction of Compound Modes of Action in Complex Systems". 

Although natural products form the basis for over half of all FDA-approved drugs, methods of compound discovery have changed little since the discovery of penicillin in the 1930’s. Our program aims to exploit advances in both high-content screening and mass spectrometric analysis for the development of new technologies for natural product discovery. By integrating data from these two information-rich platforms we aim to create systems capable of predicting the identity and function of all bioactive constituents from any natural products library, and to use these tools to discovery next-generation lead compounds in priority disease areas. This presentation will summarize our recent work in the areas of image-based phenotypic screening for natural products, as well as our ongoing efforts to develop untargeted metabolomics tools for the comprehensive characterization of natural products libraries. 

Professor Roger Linington  is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Chemical Biology and High-Throughput Screening in the Department of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His research program focuses on the development of new technologies for natural products discovery, including both biological screening platforms and high-throughput chemical analysis. The seminar title and abstract are given below and the advert is attached.  Integration of Phenotypic and Metabolomic Datasets for the De Novo Prediction of Compound Modes of Action in Complex Systems