Ask the Experts: Dr Adam Rosebrock

Dr Adam Rosebrock

Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and member of the Cancer Center at Stony Brook School of Medicine (NY, USA).

Adam Rosebrock has a longstanding interest in leveraging big data to address fundamental biological challenges. His lab seeks to build a quantitative understanding of the biochemical processes that underlie cellular growth and division, to map the regulatory circuitry and reactions that enable cells to respond to changes in cell state, and to do so toward a goal of identifying actionable targets for therapeutic intervention and improved industrial processes. His group actively develops new experimental and analytical methods, building genetic, hardware, and computational tools to enable quantitative mass spectrometry metabolomics.

What began your interest in metabolomics?

I came to metabolomics organically (no pun intended) from a background in genomics and transcriptional analysis. In those fields, one commonly extrapolates biological state from RNA levels with a goal of predicting physiological state of cells or tissues. Using metabolomics to directly measure metabolite levels and reaction rates reduces or eliminates the need for extrapolation, provides a powerful view into the biochemical state of the cell, and ultimately allows my group make new connections between genotype and phenotype.