Hanhineva Lab – the Food, gut & nutritional metabolomics research group
Welcome to our lab homepage!
Who we are and what we do
We are an academic research team based in the cities of Turku and Kuopio, Finland. We use metabolomics as our main research tool to investigate different scientific topics ranging from food science and nutrition to gut microbial metabolism and the tissue- and cellular-level effects. The key interests of our group include:
- the biochemical profiles of foods and how they are altered by food processing,
- how diet can beneficially affect health, and
- how gut microbiota is linked with the diet in affecting overall and brain health.
Our research group is based at the University of Turku, Department of Life Technologies, led by professor Kati Hanhineva. In addition, part of the group is located at the University of Eastern Finland, Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition, Kuopio. We also provide metabolomics services via our spin-off company, Afekta Technologies, located in Kuopio.
Latest news
- Notame in Bioconductor!
We are excited to announce that original notame has gone through a facelift, and notame, notameViz, and notameStats are now available as Bioconductor packages in the Bioconductor 3.22 release! About the packages A combination of these packages provides an efficient, more reproducible, and more compatible framework for metabolomics data. Altogether, and similarly to the original… Read more: Notame in Bioconductor! - Throwback: 3rd Annual HealthFerm Meeting in Umeå
This year marks the final stretch of the HealthFerm project, in which our team has been actively involved in the metabolomics analyses of numerous sample sets developed by our consortium partners. To reflect on progress and strategise, the 3rd Annual HealthFerm Consortium Meeting was held in the student city of Umeå, Sweden, from 8–10 September.… Read more: Throwback: 3rd Annual HealthFerm Meeting in Umeå - Doctoral defense of Hany Ahmed, MSc, 03 Oct 2025
Hany will defend his doctoral dissertation at the University of Turku Main building Tauno Nurmela hall on Friday 03 October at 12pm. The thesis in Food Chemistry is titled “Molecular Insights to Gut–Brain Communication: Metabolomics Approach on Lifestyle Influences”, where the work explores the effect of heavy alcohol and fiber supplementation on gut and brain… Read more: Doctoral defense of Hany Ahmed, MSc, 03 Oct 2025 - Just out: The reproducible LC-MS human plasma metabolome
Human plasma is a well-studied biofluid in terms of its metabolite composition, as shown by the thousands of entries in the Human Metabolome Database. However, not even nearly all of them are every time detectable by untargeted LC-MS when analysing typical fasting plasma samples. Therefore, we collaborated with Chalmers University of Technology and the International… Read more: Just out: The reproducible LC-MS human plasma metabolome - Impact of processing on the composition of plant-based foods
Impact of processing on the biochemical composition of plant-based foods published in Nature Food! Our research studying the impact of various processing techniques on the biochemical composition of plant-based foods was recently published in Nature Food. We conducted a non-targeted metabolomics analysis on a variety of plant-based protein-rich foods (PBPR) made using different raw materials and… Read more: Impact of processing on the composition of plant-based foods - Throwback: Nutrition Society Winter Conference 2025
End of January Kati had the possibility to visit London and give a presentation at the Nutrition Society Winter Conference 2025, themed “Dietary guidelines and advice – current and future”. It was great to attend the meeting at the beautiful premises of The Royal Society, and to give an overview of how metabolomics research has… Read more: Throwback: Nutrition Society Winter Conference 2025
Funding
We are grateful to the following organizations and foundations for supporting our research work.
