The 2024 Nordic Metabolomics Conference was organized in Tuku, Finland, August 26-28, hosted by Alex Dickens, Kati Hanhineva, and Matej Orešič, with doctoral students Hany Ahmed and Jasmin Raita from our group as part of the organizing committee. This was the first time to have the event in Finland, and it had the highest attendance of the Nordic Metabolomics Conference organized so far. The team also had 7 representatives participating with two oral and six poster presentations. Doctoral student Retu Haikonen was awarded the Nordic Metabolomics Society early career travel grant.
On Sunday, August 25, Ville Koistinen and Retu Haikonen from our group organized a workshop on the visualization of metabolomics data at the early-career event (material available under the “materials” tab of the web pages) . The following day, August 26, Retu gave another oral presentation on his work on predicting plasma metabolites based on the saliva samples. The same day, our postdoctoral researchers Ville Koistinen, Ambrin Babu, Veera Houttu and Topi Meuronen, and doctoral researchers Denisse Avella, Jasmin Raita, Sara Rocha, Shania Saini and Hany Ahmed presented their posters with topics related to gut microbiota modulation by plant-based diets and plant metabolomics. Topi also did a speed presentation about optimizing microdissection sample sizes for reliable non-targeted LC-MS metabolomic profiling of host-microbiota metabolites in chicken gut samples.
Immediately after the NMC2024 conference, we had the 33rd BioCity Symposium also organized at Turku, the same premises and Alex, Kati, and Matej participated in the organization committee. The BioCity symposium is an internationally recognized event covering various aspects of biosciences, and this year the title was “Unleashing the power of metabolism”, thus matching very well with the metabolomics theme of the week. The symposium hosted an excellent group of invited world-leading scientists giving presentations on e.g. inflammation metabolism and gut microbiota-mediated health-relevant compounds. Many participants took advantage and joined both events and also enjoyed the beautiful end-of-summer weather in Turku, as exemplified by the picture taken during the dinner cruise in Turku archipelago.