Staff Exchange: Metabolomics and Omics Tools
Between 2 and 27 February 2026, the Professor and Coordinator of the ISOPlexis Centre, Miguel Ângelo Almeida Pinheiro de Carvalho, the Invited Assistant Researcher at the ISOPlexis Centre, Nuno Miguel Velosa Nunes, and the PhD student and associate member of the ISOPlexis Centre, João Marcelo Gontardo Gaspar, are undertaking a staff exchange at the Department of Food and Drug of the University of Parma (UNIPR), in Parma, Italy, within the framework of the isUP-AgrO project.
This staff exchange, led by UNIPR and involving the participation of the University of Madeira (UMa), aims to strengthen knowledge and applications of omics methodologies — including proteomics, peptidomics, lipidomics, genomics, and enzymomics — in the fields of agriculture and food production. During this stay, the ISOPlexis team is receiving specialized training in advanced metabolomics tools and other omics approaches applied to food chemistry and agri-food sciences.
A central focus of the training is the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a quantitative analytical technique that enables characterization of the molecular composition of food products and plant samples. These approaches allow the evaluation of the chemical profiling of plants — particularly crops such as grapevine — and the understanding of responses to different abiotic and biotic stresses, plant–environment and soil–microbiota interactions, as well as the identification of relevant bioactive compounds and the impact of agricultural practices and climatic conditions on their production and accumulation.
Various complementary analytical methodologies are also addressed, including advanced liquid and gas chromatographic techniques coupled with mass spectrometry, spectroscopic methods, and statistical and computational strategies for the analysis and interpretation of large datasets.
This initiative is part of the project “Unlocking the Potential for Agricultural Research on an EU Outermost Region: Boosting ISOPlexis Centre (isUP-AgrO)”, funded by the European Union, which aims to strengthen ISOPlexis as a European reference in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Technology through international collaboration with UNIPR (Italy), IRNAS (Spain), and Saturntech (Portugal), under the coordination of the University of Madeira.
