From Chromatography Fundamentals to Biological Discovery: Real-World Lessons from High-Throughput Metabolomics

High-Throughput Metabolomics: Connecting Chromatography to Biological Discovery

Solid-core particle technology has become a powerful tool for improving chromatographic performance, offering higher efficiency, lower backpressure, and faster separations than traditional fully porous particles. But what makes these particles fundamentally different, and how do those differences translate into real-world benefits? In this webinar, we will explore the principles behind solid-core particle design, including particle morphology, the significance of rho value when scaling methods, and the factors that contribute to enhanced column efficiency. Attendees will gain a practical understanding of how solid-core columns enable high-efficiency separations, support operation at elevated flow rates, and challenge common assumptions about the mechanisms responsible for their performance.

Moving from chromatography theory to application, guest speaker Sammy Pontrelli will share how his team uses high-throughput LC-MS metabolomics to study microbial carbon metabolism. Speaking from a biologist's perspective, he will discuss how analytical approaches are often tailored to answer biological questions, even when they do not align perfectly with traditional analytical chemistry best practices.

Through real-world examples, attendees will learn how a T3 stationary phase provided a practical alternative between flow injection analysis and HILIC for the analysis of highly polar metabolites, delivering reproducible retention times and useful selectivity at high throughput. The presentation will also highlight how stable retention across hundreds of injections can support metabolite identification workflows, and how thoughtful mitigation of metal interactions can improve the detection of challenging phosphorylated metabolites, including ATP, ADP, and AMP.

Why you should attend

• To understand how solid-core particle technology enables high-efficiency, high-throughput separations
• To learn practical approaches for analyzing highly polar metabolites by LC-MS
• To discover strategies for improving retention-time stability and mitigating metal interactions in challenging metabolomics workflows

Who should attend

This webinar is designed for analytical scientists, chromatographers, LC-MS and metabolomics researchers, biologists, biochemists, and scientists involved in method development or high-throughput analysis of small molecules. 

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Presenter: Maureen DeLoffi (Principal Product Marketing Manager, Waters Corporation)

Maureen DeLoffi is a Principal Product Manager at Waters Corporation, where she manages the small molecule portfolio of Analytical HPLC columns. Prior to this role, she spent over 12 years as a scientist in the Column Technology Development Lab at Waters.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire.

Presenter: Sammy Pontrelli (Assistant Professor, Biology, KU Leuven)

Sammy Pontrelli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at KU Leuven and a group leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology. He leads the Lab of Microbial Metabolic Interactions, where his team studies how microbial metabolism influences carbon cycling in the ocean.

He trained in bioengineering at Santa Clara University and completed his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA, where he worked on microbial engineering and biofuel production. He then joined ETH Zurich as a Simons Foundation postdoctoral fellow, shifting his research toward natural marine microbial communities and the ecological processes that govern organic matter transformation.

His group develops high-throughput LC-MS metabolomics methods to phenotype central carbon metabolism in environmental microbial isolates, combining these with targeted enzyme assays to connect metabolic phenotypes directly to the reactions driving them. This approach allows his team to resolve how microbial metabolism transforms complex substrates — from polysaccharides to metabolites — with enough resolution to link molecular-level activity to broader patterns in marine carbon cycling. At KU Leuven, his group applies this framework to the molecular mechanisms that produce, transform, and stabilize organic carbon in marine environments, aiming to understand how microbial processes respond to environmental change and shape the long-term fate of carbon in the ocean.