Ricerc@Sapienza

This proposal aims to supply innovative, fast and accurate analytical methods, to avoid the delay in diagnosis in cases of Crohn¿s disease, ulcerative colitis, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, and cryptogenic cirrhosis. In fact, the co-morbidity of the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are important objectives to be faced and solved, since these diseases are increasingly prevalent disorders with a huge impact on the future health of citizens. At present, there is a need to overcome the methods usually adopted for the diagnosis of NAFLD and IBD, because in case of NAFLD the invasive procedure liver biopsy is applied with several unavoidable risks and complications, and also the analysis of IBD requires invasive and expensive procedures, such as ileocolonoscopy combined with cross-sectional imaging by computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging.
In this overall scenario, the project will provide innovative and high performant analytical methods for an effective and reliable identification of biomarkers in gut microbiota, exploiting cross-cutting technologies in liquid chromatographic coupled to high resolution mass spectrometry. In detail, analytical methods based on ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) and nanoHPLC coupled to high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) will be employed to extend the coverage of metabolites and lipids belonging to the gut microbiota, in order to discover new biomarkers related to IBD and NAFLD.
To deliver accurate and highly sensitive analytical methods in so complex a matrix, the analytical methods developed will exploit the latest technologies available for analyte separation by liquid chromatography and analysis by MS as well as will improve untargeted metabolomics and lipidomics and targeted metabolomics combined with bioinformatics.