Alexander Aksenov

The intricate biological mechanisms that govern life are amazing in their complexity. We only at the beginning of truly appreciating the extent of molecular diversity of life and how the molecular distributions change in living systems. Our research is in metabolomics, the study of processes involving small molecules. We focus on “global” metabolomics of life, where the living systems are studied in situ and are extensively sampled to capture their native complexity. Mass spectrometry (MS) has emerged as the key technology used in metabolomics. We use MS in our research along with advanced data analysis approaches to extract chemical knowledge from MS data. We explore the molecular “dark matter” of living systems – the compounds that are there, but we don’t yet know what they are.