[CEPCEB_All] IIGB Seminar: Pieter Dorrestein- Friday 9/26

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*         Pieter Dorrestein*

                         University of California San Diego

                   https://dorresteinlab.ucsd.edu/home

*Decoding a Book with 86% of the Words Missing: Toward Solutions for the
Dark Metabolome*


*Date:* Friday, September 26

*Time:* 12:00 pm-1:00pm

*Location: *Genomics Auditorium 1102


*Abstract:*
Despite advances in high-resolution mass spectrometry and computational
tools, only ~14% of molecular features detected in human samples can be
confidently annotated, leaving the vast majority of the “dark metabolome”
uncharacterized. This gap is akin to attempting to interpret a book where
more than four out of five words are missing - enough to sense fragments of
meaning, but insufficient to follow the full story. Existing pathway maps,
largely derived from mid-20th century biochemistry, capture only a narrow
portion of human chemical space and fail to account for the complexity
introduced by diet, microbiomes, environment, and xenobiotics. Here we
discuss the current state of metabolomics, the challenges of annotation and
integration, and the urgent need for scalable strategies - including
synthetic libraries, Data science-driven structural inference, and global
data harmonization - to begin filling in the missing words. Only by
reconstructing the unseen majority can we transform metabolomics from a
fragmented narrative into a coherent story of human biology and health.
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