Professor Roy Goodacre FRSC, FLSW, FSAS

Research Overview

Roy and his research group have extensive experience in MS-based metabolomics, Raman spectroscopy and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), as well as advanced multivariate data analysis. These are being developed for:
- (i) health, disease and ageing;
- (ii) bacterial detection and AMR;
- (iii) food security using portable capable guardians;
- (iv) imaging tissue and single cells.

Highlights:

Our research team have developed and established long-term metabolomics which allows fusion of GC-MS and LC-MS data collected over 12-24 months. This approach is based on mathematical corrections which effectively removes any (unavoidable) chromatographic and mass spectrometry instrumental drift. This has now been taken up widely by the community, hence why our Nature Protocols paper is very highly cited (>2500 times), and we have used this for large scale (n=2000) metabolic profiling studies published in Nature Communications.

Standardisation in Metabolomics is important and Roy was the data analysis lead for the Metabolomics Standards Initiative. Important community outputs include:
- standards for naming metabolites a highly rated paper (>4000 citations) published in Metabolomics.
- guidelines for reporting data processing also published in Metabolomics.
- global community efforts for standardisation in quality assurance and quality control in non-targeted metabolomics - MQACC.
- evaluation of the quality and reliability of targeted metabolomics assays from the UK Consortium on Metabolic Phenotyping (MAP/UK) published in Nature Protocols.

In order to understand metabolic flux on a single cell level (i.e., with respect to substrate use in bacterial communities) we are also developing high spatial resolution (0.5 µm is typical) photothermal infrared, Raman, SRS and CARS imaging. As well as for probing heterogeneity in Bacillus populations producing poly-3-hydroxybutyrate a paper published recently in Analytical Chemistry.

We are also active in surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and were the first group to demonstrate that this can be used for the discrimination of bacteria - see our early paper published in Analytical Chemistry. If you're interested in SERS please read our community review published in ACS Nano on the Present and Future of SERS.

The images below highlight areas of our research.