Targeted Metabolomics on Rare Primary Cells

The main goal of my lab is to maintain a healthy hematopoietic stem cell pull up in aging to avoid hematological malignancies, and we do so by performing dietary interventions. So in particular, we're interested to understand how dietary derived metabolites regulate stemness and also intracellular metabolites how they regulate the stem cell fate. Hematopoietic stem cells is a very rare population, meaning that we always face the challenge that we have not enough material to perform our experiments.

But now with the establishment of single cell methods, and also with low input methods, we have achieved a new knowledge on how these stem cells are regulated. Hematopoietic stem cells is a very rare population and on top, they're very tiny. Now, with the methods that we have developed such, for example, low input metabolomics based on mass spec, we now can detect with very low number of cells, hundreds of metabolites, this now allowed us to understand what is the role of certain metabolites for stem cell regulation.

In the past, metabolomics analysis of rare primary cells required many mice and days of work and sample preparation. With our new protocol, we need fewer mice and less time. Additionally, we have reduced the number of manual steps, so the whole protocol becomes more robust.

For the future, we have planned to adapt our low input protocol to enable additional analysis and rare primary cells. For example, non-targeted metabolomics and lipidomics.