News & Events

Check out the groups most recent publication featuring Stellena's (currently a post-doc at the University of Toronto) work validating urinary thiocyanate as a biomarker of active tobacco smoking from participants in the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study. They examined the associations between urinary thiocyanate and self-reported never and current smokers among 1000 participants from 14 countries using capillary electrophoresis and analyzed urinary thiocyanate in light and heavy smokers as compared to never-smokers from high-, middle-, and low-income countries. The work was also featured in a McMaster press release, how exciting!

Validation of Urinary Thiocyanate as a Robust Biomarker of Active Tobacco Smoking in the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological Study

McMaster researchers find tobacco users in Canada are exposed to higher levels of cyanide than other regions

The W. A. E. McBryde Medal is presented to a young scientist working in Canada who has made a significant achievement in pure or applied analytical chemistry. We are so pleased to announce that Philip Britz-McKibbin is the 2023 recipient. We are looking forward to CSC to accept this prestigious honor. 

https://www.cheminst.ca/awards/csc/mcbryde-medal/

Congrats to Meera and Zach on their most recent publication exploring the importance of choline and carnitine during fetal development. They discovered that despite inadequate choline intake, serum free choline was elevated in late pregnancy and enriched in cord blood compared to maternal serum. Serum carnitine declined in late pregnancy despite a high protein diet. The higher cord:maternal concentrations in choline and carnitine metabolites suggests active uptake in late pregnancy.

We are very excited to host Metabolomics 2023 in picturesque Niagara Falls! Abstract submissions are now open, we hope to see you there!

The conference will cover the major scientific themes of: Technology Advances; Computational Metabolomics, Statistics, and Bioinformatics; Metabolomics in Health and Disease; and Metabolomics of Plants, Food, Environment and Microbes. A special theme for this conference will focus on Mental Health, Drug Addiction and Medicinal Cannabis. 

We are always very happy to see our grad students defend and a massive congratulations needs to be extended to Ritchie Ly for successfully defending his PhD thesis where he focused on expanding our groups repertoire of lipids we can detect using NACE-MS. Ritchie has not only gained a respect from everyone in our lab that he has mentored but is well known across campus by all of the students he has TA'd winning McMaster's TA award in 2020. Congrats Ritchie and all the best on your future endeavours in Japan!

Another successful defense in our research group. A big congratulations to Megan who successfully defended her Masters thesis this past Thursday. Her contributions on the proper handling and storage conditions of fecal samples will be used in the lab for generations to come. We cannot wait to see where you are off to next and all that you accomplish.

We are very exciting to be sharing a recent feature article in the Globe & Mail featuring a former PhD student's work. Congratulations to Stellena on having your research on the prevalence of iodine deficiency and state of iodine nutrition across Canada featured in this article. Check it out!!

Why you need to put iodine on your nutritional radar

We really enjoyed our time at ICASS last week in Kingston. From the sunset dinner cruise to the presentations from our lab group we had a great time. Great work Zach, Vanessa, and Erick on your presentations.

A big congratulations to Biban who successfully defended her PhD today. Over the past couple years, Biban focused on several studies that took advantage of multiplexed capillary electrophoresis separations for applications in metabolomics and exposomics. This ranged from rapid screening of urinary hydroxypyrene to monitor PAH exposures from tobacco smoke/ambient air pollution to investigating and deducing risk assessment from smoking between high, middle and low income countries using data from over 63 countries.

Congratulations again and best of luck on your future endeavours. 

A very big congratulations to Stellena who successfully defended her PhD defense today. Over the past 5 years Stellena has had two major research themes that take advantage of capillary electrophoresis (CE) separations, including (1) the targeted analysis of urinary iodide and thiocyanate for assessment of nutritional adequacy and tobacco smoke exposures in the population, and (2) the discovery of new biomarkers in sweat specimens that may improve universal newborn screening programs for cystic fibrosis (CF) infants that goes beyond impaired chloride transport.

The lab won't be the same without you but we cannot wait to see all that you accomplish.

Congratulations to Erick on his recently published work in the Journal of Lipid Research on high throughput screening for Vitamin D status for an ongoing clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Vitamin D supplementation to improve outcomes in clinically ill children.

Article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35337847/

McMaster Daily News Link: https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/mcmaster-researchers-help-develop-rapid-reliable-vitamin-d-test/

Congratulations to our colleagues at PHRI and to Biban for your recent publication using exposomics for more reliable assessment of global disparities in smoking hazards. Separate studies suggest that the risks from smoking might vary between high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries, but this has not yet been systematically examined within a single study using standardised approaches. We examined the variations in risks from smoking across different country income groups and some of their potential reasons.

Variations in risks from smoking between high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries: an analysis of data from 179 000 participants from 63 countries

Pictures from our group outing at Nique for a 2021 Christmas dinner. Celebrating milestones reached by Meera and Zach for a large scale project.

It's a new academic year in the Britz-McKibbin group and that means we have new undergrads to introduce. Welcome Vanessa, Claire, and Luxiga to our research group, we can't wait to see all your progress this year! Welcome back to Na-Yung, Navneet, Hani, and Michael as well who have all returned for further research opportunities. Glad to have all of you back!!

Check out our newest publication that features the first inter-method comparison of MSI-CE-MS with 1H NMR for serum metabolite quantification, as well as the identification of serum biomarkers associated with liver fibrosis progression in hepatitis C patients. Congratulations to Meera and Zach as well as our previous thesis students, Holly and Richel for this publication. Thanks to all of our collaborators as well including Dr. Sarfaraz and Dr. Wishart for your ongoing support and collaboration.

A Cross-Platform Metabolomics Comparison Identifies Serum Metabolite Signatures of Liver Fibrosis Progression in Chronic Hepatitis C Patients

The Britz group would also like to welcome Navneet Kang to our research group as an NSERC undergraduate summer student. Navneet comes to us from the Chemical Biology program here at McMaster. We can't wait to see what exciting research you are apart of this summer.

The Britz-McKibbin group would like to congratulate one of our former members, Mai Yamamoto, for her recent publication seeking to identify urinary metabolic signatures of pediatric IBD at diagnosis, and during induction treatment. We are always excited to see one of our current (or former) student's work get published. In Mai's work over 122 urinary metabolites were reliably measured from pediatric IBD patients and dynamic changes in sum-normalized urinary metabolites were also monitored following exclusive enteral nutrition (EEN) or corticosteroid therapy (CT) in repeat urine samples collected over 8 weeks. Take a look at her results!

Urinary Metabolites Enable Differential Diagnosis and Therapeutic Monitoring of Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease

A big congratulations to all of our undergraduate thesis students who defended their theses tonight! A great job done by all. Everyone in the Britz-McKibbin group wishes each of you nothing but the best in your future endeavors. Also a HUGE congrats to Sriprada Thallpalli on winning the Analytical section's award for best presentation!

Congratulations to Meera, Zach, Biban and everyone else who contributed to our most recent publication in Nature Protocols. Over 7 months, 4 cohorts or pregnant women from across Canada were profiled (n = 1004) using metabolomics. Stringent quality controls were used to ensure samples were analyzed both accurately and precisely using multisegment injection-capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry. We also report reference intervals for 53 serum metabolites from a diverse population of women in their second trimester of pregnancy. Take a look at the publication!

The maternal serum metabolome by multisegment injection-capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry: a high-throughput platform and standardized data workflow for large-scale epidemiological studies

It's a new semester and that means a new co-op student is starting in the Britz-McKibbin group. Welcome to the group Na-Yung, we are looking forward to your contributions this semester to our lab group's research particularly with the large-scale epidemiological PURE study. With it being the end of last semester too we also have to say good-bye to Eric. Thanks for all of your help as a co-op student. With that being said, we are happy to still have you in the research group as you finish your final semester at McMaster as a research student.

A big congratulations to Julie-Anne, a former undergrad in the Britz-McKibbin group currently in Medical School at McGill University for her recent publication in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. Therein she validated two methods for determination of 3 short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) and 5 electrolytes in lyophilized fecal extracts using CE-iUV. She was able to study how these SCFAs and electrolytes varied among Crohn's and ulcerative colitis patients who were treated with exclusive enteral nutrition or corticosteroid therapy. Check out her work!!

Lyophilized fecal short-chain fatty acid and electrolyte determination by capillary electrophoresis with indirect UV detection for assessment of pediatric inflammatory bowel disease

Article link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.analchem.0c03129

Capillary zone electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE-MS) is a mature analytical tool for the efficient profiling of (highly) polar and ionizable compounds. However, the use of CE-MS in comparison to other separation techniques remains underrepresented in metabolomics, as this analytical approach is still perceived as technically challenging and less reproducible, notably for migration time. The latter is key for a reliable comparison of metabolic profiles and for unknown biomarker identification that is complementary to high resolution MS/MS. In this work, we present the results of a Metabo-ring trial involving 16 CE-MS platforms among 13 different laboratories spanning two continents. The goal was to assess the reproducibility and identification capability of CE-MS by employing effective electrophoretic mobility (µeff) as the key parameter in comparison to the relative migration time (RMT) approach. For this purpose, a representative cationic metabolite mixture in water, pretreated human plasma and urine samples spiked with the same metabolite mixture, were used and distributed for analysis by all laboratories. The µeff was determined for all metabolites spiked into each sample. The background electrolyte (BGE) was prepared and employed by each participating lab following the same protocol. All other parameters (capillary, interface, injection volume, voltage ramp, temperature, capillary conditioning and rinsing procedure, etc.) were left to the discretion of the contributing labs. The results revealed that the reproducibility of the µeff for 20 out of the 21 model compounds was below 3.1% vs. 10.9% for RMT, regardless of the huge heterogeneity in experimental conditions and platforms across the thirteen labs. Overall, this Metabo-ring trial demonstrated that CE-MS is a viable and reproducible approach for metabolomics.

Article link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.0c03212

Urinary 1-hydroxypyrene (HP) is a widely used biomarker of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon exposure relevant for biomonitoring the deleterious health impacts from tobacco smoke and ambient air pollution, as well as the hazards of certain occupations. Conventional methods for urinary HP analysis based on liquid chromatography with native fluorescence detection or tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) are limited by low sample throughput and complicated sample workup protocols that are prone to bias. Herein, we introduce a high throughput method to directly analyze the intact glucuronide conjugate of HP (HP-G) in human urine after a simple acidified ether extraction procedure when using multisegment injection–capillary electrophoresis–tandem mass spectrometry (MSI–CE–MS/MS). Multiplexed analyses of 13 independent urine extracts are achieved in a single run (<3 min/sample) with stringent quality control while avoiding enzyme deconjugation and precolumn chemical derivatization. Method validation demonstrates good technical precision (CV = 7.7%, n = 45) and accuracy with a mean recovery of (93 ± 3%) for urinary HP-G at three concentration levels with adequate detection limits (7 ng/L, S/N = 3). An interlaboratory method comparison of urine samples collected from firefighters deployed in the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire also confirms good mutual agreement with an acceptable negative bias (mean bias = 15%, n = 55) when measuring urinary HP-G by MSI–CE–MS/MS as compared to total hydrolyzed urinary HP by GC–MS due to the low residual levels of free HP and its sulfate conjugate. This multiplexed separation platform is optimal for large-scale biomonitoring studies of air pollution relevant to global health as well as occupational smoke exposures in firefighters susceptible to dermal PAH absorption when using personal protective equipment.

Congratulations to Dr. Sandi Azab on her successful PhD defense (Chemical Biology) on Friday August 14, 2020. 

A big congratulations to Ritchie for being awarded the MacDATA Graduate Fellowship. For those of you familiar with MSI-CE-MS, the platform used in the Britz-McKibbin group, although we have found ways to increase the throughput of data acquisition, data processing is still a bottleneck. We cannot wait to see what improvements Ritchie can make to help make data processing more efficient.

The aims of the MacDATA Graduate Fellowship Program are: (1) To provide trainees with an opportunity to acquire practical and theoretical skills in data science. (2) To facilitate exchange of expertise and knowledge in data science across faculties.

It's been another really productive week here in the Britz-McKibbin group with another publication from Sandi. For this work Sandi studied perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), a major contaminant class due to their ubiquitous prevalence, persistence, and endocrine disrupting activity that can contribute to chronic disease risk (most notably with exposures early in life). Sandi found that PFAS exposures in pregnant women was lower in this specific birth cohort (SouTh Asian birth cohoRT) relative to serum collected prior to 2009 likely due to subsequent phase out of their production. Overall, the method highlighted in this paper offers a convenient approach for large‐scale biomonitoring of environmental exposures to legacy PFASs and their emerging replacements. Take a look at the manuscript (link below)!

Rapid biomonitoring of perfluoroalkyl substance exposures in serum by multisegment injection‐nonaqueous capillary electrophoresis‐tandem mass spectrometry

The Britz-McKibbin group is very excited to announce the recently publication of some of Michelle Saoi's PhD research assessing sex-specific differences in fetal development during gestation in placental tissue. This work was done in collaboration with Deb Sloboda's group and we can't wait for you to check out the paper published in Scientific Reports. Michelle recently graduated from McMaster and is currently a Metabolomics Specialist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in NYC!