Our research group has worked very hard work over the last year, and it’s been nice to have such a great team as part of the Laboratory for Bioanalytical Spectroscopy in the CMR.

It is fair to say that 2022 has been another strange year thanks to COVID-19.  But it is good to think that this year we are starting to get back to normal and let’s hope it continues for 2023.

In 2022 we welcomed Dakshat as a postdoc in Easter, Harriet and Joe as new PhD students in October, and very recently in December Becky as a MPhil student.  We also welcomed Jackie and her administrative support for the group is brilliant.  We also said goodbye to Amanda and wish her all the very best within her new faculty role as Executive Officer / PA to the Director of Student Experience and Enhancement.

We had a successfully year with many research outputs, and in particular the highlights I’d like to make are that:

• Iva had her first paper published in Metabolomics on using metabolomics of serum from COVID-19 patients for assessing disease severity and outcome.
• Tia had her first paper published in Frontiers of Microbiology on the development of metabolic fingerprint analysis using FT-IR spectroscopy of recombinant protein production in E. coli.
• Shwan had a paper published in RSC’s Chemical Science on Raman and infrared spectroscopy can be combined simultaneously to study bacterial infections at the single cell level.

These all featured in the Faculty’s First Paper Campaign – Well done all!

In other news on publications with Rick we had some successes with work from mQACC (Metabolomics Quality Assurance and Quality Control Consortium) with a couple of nice reviews/white papers being published in Metabolomics:

• Quality assurance and quality control reporting in untargeted metabolic phenotyping: mQACC recommendations for analytical quality management
• Reference materials for MS-based untargeted metabolomics and lipidomics: a review by the metabolomics quality assurance and quality control consortium (mQACC)

We had several great successes:

• NERC have funded us for a training grant in multiomics and this was a nice grant written and led by Cate.
• Rick led an MRC grant for an LC-MS for precision medicine.
• Our Unilever project on combining metabolomics and transcriptomics on human skin was awarded and Dakshat started on this after Easter.
• Our EPSRC-SFI grant on Biopharmaceutical Production was awarded and Cassio started on this in July. We have also partnered with Renishaw and have a PhD to complement this – this starts October 2023. 
• Our BBSRC ALERT21 equipment grant was awarded and in December we have ordered a SCIEX EchoMS for very highthroughput metabolomics and with an LC addition will allow us to perform targeted lipidomics. 
• We collaborated with Joe Turner on a big MRC grant funded in the summer using lipidomics to look at bioactive lipids in filariasis.
• Finally, Roy led a BBSRC impact acceleration grant for faculty.

We’ve been fortunate and let’s also hope this continues in 2023.

Lastly Howbeer and I hosted Spring SciX which went off really well, despite the high levels of COVID in the UK at that time. I’d like to personally thank Howbeer for his hard work and dedication on this. He certainly did all the heavy lifting and made the meeting one that we can all be very proud of as it showcased Liverpool in a really nice way.

Wishing you all the very best for a peaceful, productive and prosperous new year.