News & Events

Check out our most recent press release that discusses our most recent vitamin D work and some general recommendations related to vitamin D testing and supplementation. 

https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/here-comes-the-sun-britz-mckibbin-on-what-you-need-to-know-about-vitamin-d/

We are so excited to be welcoming a visiting MSc. student from Japan, Momo Sato! She is from the Institute for Advanced Biosciences at Keio University in Tsuruoka, Japan and will be evaluating a new low-flow/sheathless CE-MS interface for metabolomic analyses. We are so excited to have her join our group for the next few months! 

Congratulations to our graduate student Claire on winning third place for her presentation at Research Colloquium Day!

Congratulations to Ana and Zach for winning first place awards for their poster and oral presentation at the 6th annual Canadian Metabolomics Conference in Montreal! 

Congratulations to our MSc. student Ana who has won the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Leadership Award. This award recognizes her research contributions, collaborations, TA-ing and helping out undergraduate students in our lab. Congratulations Ana!

A huge congratulations to Malina who won 2nd place at this year's undergraduate thesis presentation day for the Analytical session! It has been great getting to collaborate with you and we can't wait to see all you accomplish moving forward! Great research!!!

Congratulations to our undergraduate students Caitlyn, Malina and Zach on presenting their undergraduate theses! Congratulations to Zoe on presenting her 3rd year project on iSci presentation day! 

Congratulations to MSc. student Liam Surry who will be heading off for an exchange this summer at the Institute for Advanced Biosciences at Keio University in Tsuruoka Japan. 

Dr. Britz-McKibbin recently gave an interview for Metabonews that you can check out here! 

"A reflection on the evolution of metabolomics and innovations driving large-scale population health research”

http://www.metabonews.ca/Mar2025/MetaboNews_Mar2025.pdf

After obtaining her MSc. in Chemistry in our lab, Patricia has decided to rejoin our group, this time as a Research Assistant! We're so excited to have her back!

McMaster researchers have identified small molecules in the blood that may impact early childhood development, showing how dietary exposures, early life experiences and gut health can influence a child’s growth and cognitive milestones.

Dr. Britz-McKibbin's team collaborated with Brazilian scientists to conduct an untargeted metabolomic analysis of blood samples taken from more than 5,000 children between the ages of six months and five years as part of the Brazilian National Survey of Child Nutrition study.

Check out the full article here:

https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/researchers-uncover-molecules-that-may-influence-early-childhood-development/

Dr. Britz-McKibbin was featured in a CBC article where he discussed iodine deficiency and its impact on cognition and development. This news article resulted in a series of CBC radio interviews across 13 local stations in Canada. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/iodine-deficiency-second-opinion-1.7459781

Our two graduate students Ana and Claire had the opportunity to write a review paper for the Annual Review of Chemistry Journal. Check it out here!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39929542/

"Exposomics refers to the comprehensive analysis of environmental exposures over the lifespan and assessment of their biological effects on human health. This new frontier in environmental research promises new insights for assessment of the hazards of complex chemical exposures as compared to targeted biomonitoring of a limited panel of known toxicant(s). Metabolomics plays a pivotal role in expanding exposomic initiatives that require orthogonal separation methods coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry while using minimally invasive specimens from prospective cohort studies that can capture early life exposures. In this review, we outline new advances in metabolomic technologies for exposomics research over the past five years that are urgently needed to guide regulatory policies via better exposure mitigation and strategies to improve metabolic resilience."

Got to try on some funky glasses as we enjoy the last few days before the holidays!

We are please to announce the publication of our newest paper! Congratulations Erick! Check it out here!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39729551/

"We introduce PeakMeister as a new software tool in the R statistical environment to enable standardized processing of serum metabolomic data acquired by multisegment injection-capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (MSI-CE-MS), a high-throughput separation platform (<4 min/sample) which takes advantage of a serial injection format of 13 samples within a single analytical run. We performed a rigorous validation of PeakMeister by analyzing 47 cationic metabolites consistently measured in 5,000 serum and 420 quality control samples from the Brazilian National Survey on Child Nutrition (ENANI-2019) comprising a total of 224,983 metabolite peaks acquired in 40 days across three batches over an eight-month period."

From our lab to you, Happy Holidays! See you in 2025!

Our MSc. student Ana, has received a Travel Award from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology to attend the upcoming Metabolomics Association of North America Conference in Tampa, Florida!

A very big congratulations to Patricia Pissolatti on her successful masters defense titled "Integrative Metabolomic and Lipiodomic Studies for Improved Neonatal Screening of Cystic Fibrosis". We can't wait for you to begin your journey as a research associate with us!

We are thrilled to welcome three new graduate students to our research group as well as four new undergrad students.

Welcome to Zaineb, Liam, and Mariana, our three newest graduate students. Also welcome to Christy, Caitlyn, Zachary, and Malina who will be completing research projects with us during this academic year. 

We can't wait to see everything you will accomplish. 

We wanted to highlight a recent podcast that one of our group members participated in. Thanks Sandi for your candid conversation about your interests in metabolomic epidemiology and childhood obesity. Check out the podcast using the link below!

Metabolomic epidemiology & childhood obesity

Dr. Britz very much enjoyed his time at the Metabolomics Society Conference last week, which was hosted in Osaka Japan! There he presented on Erick's PhD work assessing treatment responses to a single large bolus dose of cholecalciferol in vitamin D deficient critically ill children.

Check our McMaster's most recent Daily News blog where our research assistant Zach was featured congratulating him on his Vanier award. We look forward to him starting his PhD in Jan. 2025!

McMaster celebrates six new Vanier Scholars

And just like that, another student successfully defended their PhD thesis. Congratulations to Dr. Erick Helmeczi who defended yesterday. Erick's work focused on developing new screening tools for Vitamin D deficiency, particularly for children in the ICU. Recent work has shown worse health outcomes for deficient children, setting the stage for Erick's work.

He also developed new software tools to help streamline our data workflow. Specifically he developed PeakMeister, a new data processing tool to help automate data pre-processing when performing multisegment injection-capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (MSI-CE-MS). Historically data pre-processing has been the most time-consuming and cumbersome step of our workflow, but not anymore thanks to Erick's contributions. 

We would like to congratulate Patricia, one of our masters students who received a travel award for oral presentation that took place in the Biomedical Mass Spectrometry symposium at CSC (Canadian Chemistry Conference) in Winnipeg last week! Her talk focused on lipidomic studies on dried blood spot extracts for early detection of cystic fibrosis in newborns.

We are thrilled to finally announce that one of this years prestigious Vanier recipients is our lab assistant Zach. We are beyond excited for him as he begins his PhD in our research group. Zach started in the Britz-McKibbin group in 2017, completing his undergraduate thesis requirement before starting his current role as research assistant in 2019. This award includes the highest recognitions of his accomplishments and leadership abilities. Many congratulations as you begin working towards finding biochemical insights into early exposures associated with childhood obesity!

Celebrating excellence in Canadian research: Announcing recipients of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships

Ana attended the CREST (Current Research in Engineering, Health Sciences and Technology) conference this past Saturday, here at McMaster. She had a great time and was able to share a poster where she presented her ongoing research in biomarker discovery of burn injuries. Many thanks to the WISE (Women In Science and Engineering) initiative for hosting this conference. 

We had a great time last week at the 5th annual Canadian Metabolomics Conference hosted at the University of British Columbia. It was great to catch up with our fellow Canadian metabolomic researchers. An added bonus was the BC mountain range as our backdrop for this conference.

A major congratulations to Zach, our research assistant, who won 2nd place for his oral presentation titled "A method for comprehensive drug surveillance of clinically depressed patients by multisegment injection-capillary eletrophoresis-mass spectrometry"!

Many congratulations to all the Chemistry and Chemical Biology undergraduate students who defended their thesis yesterday. A special shout-out to Haley and Victoria, two students who completed their work in our research group. We hope you both gained experience and analytical knowledge that will set you up for success in the future. 

We would be remiss not to also mention Esther and Yasmin who also completed research projects in our research group this academic year. The pleasure was ours getting to walk alongside all four of you as you undertook your respective independent research project. 

A massive congratulations to Tommy, who we had the opportunity to host on a research stay in 2022 on his recent Nature publication. We know how hard you have been working towards this publication. In his work Tommy conducted a multi-omics study comprising three generations of family members to investigate the early development of the gut microbiota. We are honoured to be featured in this work! Want to check it out? See the link below.

Comparative characterization of the infant gut microbiome and their maternal lineage by a multi-omics approach

The Britz group would like to extend a warm welcome to 2 new lab members joining our research group. José Bozelli joins us from the Biochemistry department here at McMaster. His extensive experience in lipid research is going to be a great addition to our group as we extend our capabilities beyond only metabolomics. João Victor Pimenta is joining us from Brazil. He is a visiting graduate students who will be staying with us for the next 7 months! His work involves the characterization of coffee beans, where he is trying to map their origin based on their distinct differences. Welcome to the Britz Group!