NH Department of Helath and Human Services Public Health Laboratories Shellfish Program Activites January 2006 – December 2006

The Department of Health and Human Services-New Hampshire Public Health Laboratories (DHHS-NHPHL) has continued to carry out various actions providing laboratory analyses for the routine water quality monitoring, “Red Tide” monitoring, and additional testing after rainfall, excess sewage treatment plant, and emergency events

Identifying metabolites by integrating metabolome databases with mass spectrometry cheminformatics.

Novel metabolites distinct from canonical pathways can be identified through the integration of three cheminformatics tools: BinVestigate, which queries the BinBase gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) metabolome database to match unknowns with biological metadata across over 110,000 samples; MS-DIAL 2.0, a software tool for chromatographic deconvolution of high-resolution GC-MS or liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS); and MS-FINDER 2.0, a structure-elucidation program that uses a combination of 14 metabolome databases in addition to an enzyme promiscuity library. We showcase our workflow by annotating N-methyl-uridine monophosphate (UMP), lysomonogalactosyl-monopalmitin, N-methylalanine, and two propofol derivatives

The microbial pharmacists within us: a metagenomic view of xenobiotic metabolism

Although the significance of human genetic polymorphisms in therapeutic outcomes is well established, the importance of our “second genome” (the microbiome) has been largely overlooked. In this Review, we highlight recent studies that shed light on the mechanisms linking the human gut microbiome to the efficacy and toxicity of xenobiotics, including drugs, dietary compounds and environmental toxins. Continued progress in this area could enable more precise tools for predicting patient responses and the development of a next generation of therapeutics based on or targeted at the gut microbiome. Indeed, the admirable goal of precision medicine may require us to first understand the microbial pharmacists within