We are the Laboratory for Bioanalytical Spectroscopy, and the research team leader is Roy Goodacre.

We also working within the Centre for Metabolomics Research.

We are a team of researchers and details of our multidisciplinary group can be found under the members tab.  We are currently based in the Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool.

Our research interests are broadly within analytical biotechnology, including disease diagnostics, detection, imaging and food security, as well as systems and synthetic biology. We are excited to work at the trisection of analytical chemistry, biology and computation.

We have pioneered the development of a variety of bioanalytical techniques and these include:

• Modern mass spectrometry techniques for metabolomics. Initially we focused on direct infusion and flow injection MS. We now concentrate on GC-MS and LC-MS.
• A wide variety of Raman spectroscopies including surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), Raman imaging/mapping, as well as deep UV resonance Raman (UVRR) spectroscopy.
• Fourier transform infared (FT-IR) spectroscopy for high-throughput phenotyping.
• Volatile organic compound (VOC) analysis via thermal desorption GC-MS.

These techniques are combined with advanced chemometrics and our activities in this area include:

• Traditional methods like PCA, HCA, DFA (LDA/CVA), PLSR, PLSDA.
• Multiblock approaches.
• Procrustes analysis.
• Design of Experiments (DoE) including fractional factorial analysis, genetic algorithms, Pareto optimality.
• And we don’t forget that validation is essential and we achieve this via resampling: k-fold cross validation, bootstrapping incorporating permutation testing.

Finally, we exploit these powerful combinations of analytics and computation in the following areas:

• Bacterial characterization including discrimination and rapid identification.
• Chemical imaging of cells/tissues and drug locations
• Food Security – food adulteration and food safety.
• Breathomics for detection of ventilator associated pneumonia.
• Disease diagnostic in man.
• Analysis of trace levels of toxicants, drugs of abuse etc., from human bio-fluids.