Oliver Alka

University of Tuebingen | EKU Tübingen

Neuroblastoma, the most common childhood solid tumor, originates from primitive sympathetic nervous system cells. Epoxyazadiradione (EAD) is a limonoid derived from Azadirachta indica, belonging to the family Meliaceae. In this study, we isolated the EAD from Azadirachta indica seed and studied the anti-cancer potential against neuroblastoma. Herei...

Mass spectrometry has become an indispensable tool in the life sciences. The new major version 3 of the computational framework OpenMS provides significant advancements regarding open, scalable, and reproducible high-throughput workflows for proteomics, metabolomics, and oligonucleotide mass spectrometry. OpenMS makes analyses from emerging fields...

Metabolomics experiments generate highly complex datasets, which are time and work-intensive, sometimes even error-prone if inspected manually. Therefore, new methods for automated, fast, reproducible, and accurate data processing and dereplication are required. Here, we present UmetaFlow, a computational workflow for untargeted metabolomics that c...

Metabolomics experiments generate highly complex datasets, which are time and work-intensive, sometimes even error-prone if inspected manually. Therefore, new methods for automated, fast, reproducible, and accurate data processing and dereplication are required. Here, we present UmetaFlow, a computational workflow for untargeted metabolomics that c...

Metabolomics experiments generate highly complex datasets, which are time and work-intensive, sometimes even error-prone if inspected manually. Therefore, new methods for automated, fast, reproducible, and accurate data processing and dereplication are required. Here, we present UmetaFlow, a computational workflow for untargeted metabolomics that c...

Metabolomics experiments generate highly complex datasets, which are time and work-intensive, sometimes even error-prone if inspected manually. Therefore, new methods for automated, fast, reproducible, and accurate data processing and dereplication are required. Here, we present UmetaFlow, a computational workflow for untargeted metabolomics that c...

The extraction of meaningful biological knowledge from high-throughput mass spectrometry data relies on limiting false discoveries to a manageable amount. For targeted approaches in metabolomics a main challenge is the detection of false positive metabolic features in the low signal-to-noise ranges of data-independent acquisition results and their...

Mitochondria are key organelles for cellular energetics, metabolism, signaling, and quality control and have been linked to various diseases. Different views exist on the composition of the human mitochondrial proteome. We classified >8,000 proteins in mitochondrial preparations of human cells and defined a mitochondrial high-confidence proteome of...

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) is becoming a leading analysis method in biomedical mass spectrometry. The main advantages include greater reproducibility and sensitivity and a greater dynamic range compared with data-dependent acquisition (DDA). However, the data analysis is complex and often requires expert knowledge when dealing with large-sc...

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) is becoming a leading analysis method in biomedical mass spectrometry. Main advantages include greater reproducibility, sensitivity and dynamic range compared to data-dependent acquisition (DDA). However, data analysis is complex and often requires expert knowledge when dealing with large-scale data sets. Here we...

Technological advances in high-resolution mass spectrometry (MS) vastly increased the number of samples that can be processed in a life science experiment, as well as volume and complexity of the generated data. To address the bottleneck of high-throughput data processing, we present SmartPeak (https://github.com/AutoFlowResearch/SmartPeak), an app...

Background: Aberrant hedgehog (HH) signaling is implicated in the development of various cancer entities such as medulloblastoma. Activation of GLI transcription factors was revealed as the driving force upon pathway activation. Increased phosphorylation of essential effectors such as Smoothened (SMO) and GLI proteins by kinases including Protein...

Medulloblastoma is the most common brain tumor of childhood. Precisely targeting the signaling pathways involved in medulloblastoma is needed to increase treatment efficacy. One promising treatment, inhibiting the protein Smoothened (SMO), downregulates the Hedgehog signaling pathway, but treatment resistance and severe side effects such as muscle...

Molecular networking has become a key method to visualize and annotate the chemical space in non-targeted mass spectrometry data. We present feature-based molecular networking (FBMN) as an analysis method in the Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) infrastructure that builds on chromatographic feature detection and alignment t...

SmartPeak is an application that encapsulates advanced algorithms to enable fast, accurate, and automated processing of CE-, GC- and LC-MS(/MS) data, and HPLC data for targeted and semi-targeted metabolomics, lipidomics, and fluxomics experiments.

Computational mass spectrometry is plagued by a multitude of issues, including a heterogeneous software environment, complex workflows and proprietary tools. OpenMS addresses these challenges by providing robust open-source software for users and an open, well-designed software environment for developers. OpenMS is an open-source software C++ libra...

This chapter describes the open-source tool suite OpenMS. OpenMS contains more than 180 tools which can be combined to build complex and flexible data-processing workflows. The broad range of functionality and the interoperability of these tools enable complex, complete, and reproducible data analysis workflows in computational proteomics and metab...

The determination of cocoa shell content (Theobroma cacao L.) in cocoa products using a metabolomics approach was accomplished via high performance liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (HPLC-QTOF-MS). The developed method was used to separately analyze the polar and non-polar metabolome of the cocoa testa (cocoa shell)...

Molecular networking has become a key method used to visualize and annotate the chemical space in non-targeted mass spectrometry-based experiments. However, distinguishing isomeric compounds and quantitative interpretation are currently limited. Therefore, we created Feature-based Molecular Networking (FBMN) as a new analysis method in the Global N...

The application of ketogenic diet (KD) (high fat/low carbohydrate/adequate protein) as an auxiliary cancer therapy is a field of growing attention. KD provides sufficient energy supply for healthy cells, while possibly impairing energy production in highly glycolytic tumor cells. Moreover, KD regulates insulin and tumor related growth factors (like...

Ketogenic diet (KD) is getting in the focus as auxiliary cancer therapy, since it provides sufficient energy supply for healthy cells, while impairing energy production in tumor cells underlying the Warburg effect. Thereby, it can assist in inhibiting tumor growth and simultaneously counteract cachexia, which is frequently observed in cancer patien...

Mass spectrometry (MS) is one of the primary techniques used for large scale analysis of small molecules in metabolomics studies. To date, there has been little data format standardization in this field, as different software packages export results in different formats represented in XML or plain text, making data sharing, database deposition and...

The relatively new research discipline of Eco-Metabolomics is the application of metabolomics techniques to ecology with the aim to characterise biochemical interactions of organisms across different spatial and temporal scales. Metabolomics is an untargeted biochemical approach to measure many thousands of metabolites in different species, includi...

Background: In recent years, several mass spectrometry-based omics technologies emerged to investigate qualitative and quantitative changes within thousands of biologically active components such as proteins, lipids and metabolites. The research enabled through these methods potentially contributes to the diagnosis and pathophysiology of human dis...