Dr. Louie joined the JGI in 2014 to develop the metabolomics program, and in 2019 became Platform Lead where she manages metabolomics production for community sequencing projects and heads R&D efforts to expand the metabolomics capabilities and product offerings for JGI users. Using cutting-edge mass spectrometry-based techniques, the platform delivers rich metabolite profiles from diverse biological and environmental samples in support of user science. Capabilities offered by the platform are a result of Dr. Louie’s establishment of a strong core foundation of robust mass spectrometry workflows for polar and nonpolar metabolite analysis, creation of large metabolite databases by running 1000s of metabolite standards, and development of high-throughput untargeted analysis pipelines. Beyond profiling over 10k samples/year, Dr. Louie and her team work with other JGI scientists in development of new, advanced mass spectrometry research products such as stable isotope probing (SIP) to assess metabolite turnover, DNA-SIP for helping identify active micro-organisms within complex communities, and custom software for integrating metabolomics with genomic data (MAGI) for functional annotation and identifying unknown compounds (Pactolus).
