Seminar

Scientific roadmap of Exosomes laboratory & CIC bioGUNE Metabolomics Platform

Juan Manuel Falcón, PhD

Several developments and achievements performed by our group in the following areas will be detailed in the seminar: 1) Applications and Metabolic functions of Exosomes. All cell-types of the organism secrete extracellular vesicles containing proteins, nucleic acids, lipids and metabolites that can mediate intercellular communication, and play an active role in the development and progression of certain diseases. Our group is studying these vesicles at several levels; 1) improving / developing methods to isolate and characterize them, 2) using them as platform to identify low-invasive biomarkers for several diseases, 3) using them to develop therapeutics tools, and 4) unraveling their function in metabolism. Our work has already contributed to establish the exosomes as active metabolic players that could affect the progression of disease, and also as a good biological source to identify low-invasive markers in clinical settings. 2) Therapeutic interventions in protein misfolding. We are also interested in the identification of molecules and cellular mechanisms that could help to overcome pathologies associated with protein misfolding. Thus, by creating cellular models and screening of compound libraries we identified potential drugs and targets for therapeutics interventions in rare-diseases caused by misfolded proteins. 3) Metabolomics constitutes one of the most powerful technologies to understand how a living organism interacts with its environment. Metabolomics can be defined as the quantitative and qualitative analysis of all metabolites (small molecules with a molecular weight of less than 1,500 Da) in a given organism. Active since early 2011, the CIC bioGUNE metabolomics platform has set up and acquired wide expertise in doing metabolomics on different biological matrices (including different tissues and body fluids) and has already implemented a number of procedures that are currently offered as services. The detection by UPLC-MS of an increasing number of metabolites has already been implemented to examine the methionine cycle, the pyrimidine de novo synthesis, polyamines and retinoic acid metabolisms, and some fly´s hormones. In addition, the platform has also developed procedures to perform fluxomics analysis and to study metabolomes associated to specific tissues, macromolecules and sub-cellular compartments.