Scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have developed a powerful tool that promises to help accelerate the discovery of pollutants in the environment that ultimately compromise human health. Such an innovative tool has radical implications for future understandings of and responses to environmental challenges.
Releasing the ocean – in terms of chemical diversity
For the study, Daniel Petras, an assistant professor of biochemistry at UC Riverside, and his team sought to solve a long-standing problem in marine metabolomics: What is found in the complex chemical makeup of our oceans?
There is an enormous diversity of small molecules present in the ocean that one must sort through to suss out the relevant ones representative of overall ecosystem health. The team has now developed a new computational workflow that dramatically simplifies this process, making it much easier and quicker for researchers to study the chemical composition of these environments and identify pollution sources.
According to Petras, “It is difficult to figure out which molecules in the sea are ecologically relevant because of the incredible diversity of chemicals in the ocean. We created the protocol in order to make this a much more faster process. Faster, more efficient sorting of the data means we can understand quicker about our problems with ocean pollution”.
Bringing Environmental Data Analysis to the Masses
The tool also stands out for how the team has worked to make it useful to everyone from people with no experience all the way up to experts. The computational workflow, together with the lightning fast calculations materialize in a user- friendly web-based application that allows non-experts to obtain valuable insights on their data within minutes.
The tool was designed to accommodate a wide range of researchers, from novices to experts, said co-author Mingxun Wang, an assistant professor at the time she did the work in Entrada’s lab: “It’s really for more casual users — including undergraduates — and many different community members who will be using it as part of our molecular networking software we’re developing. It provides beginners a scaffold with which they can more easily understand common data processing and analytics practices using the guidance we provide as well as the code. It helps experts run reproducible data analyses, and then share their statistical data analysis workflows and the results.
You can also see this from their effort on democratizing the chemical analysis process (also showcased through the Virtual Multiomics Lab or VMOL, a community-driven open access initiative that involves over 50 scientists coming from different parts of the world. DIAGRAM: The results of global computational mass spectrometry training VMOL initiativeTheory and overview.Virtual mass-on-line (VMOL) is an online virtual conferencing initiative emphasizing training in the field of computational mass spectrometry, data science with a goal to build capacity around the world employing such tools for environmental studies.
Conclusion
Thanks to the UC Riverside research team, this may be a major milestone in environmental analysis with the newly developed breakthrough data science tool. This new approach significantly speeds up the rate at which ocean pollutants can be identified and understood, offering insight that should lead to better ways to solve environmental problems and preserve our ecosystem. Importantly, that the team wanted to open this tool up to a broad spectrum of researchers emphasizes how their goal is to democratize environmental science-making a global interdisciplinary community able to tackle the problems we face.
