Sofia Moco

Sofia Moco is a chemical engineer and biochemist with a PhD focused on metabolomics—the study of small molecules in biological systems. She began her research on plant secondary metabolism using mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) during her PhD at Wageningen University, Netherlands.

After a postdoc at ETH Zurich, she joined Nestlé Research in Switzerland, where she led metabolomics research on metabolic diseases like diabetes, obesity, and ageing, with a focus on mitochondrial function and bioenergetics.

She developed workflows for analyzing the NAD⁺ metabolome and used stable isotope tracing to study metabolic pathways. In 2021, she became an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam, in the Department of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Here, she leads research on drug metabolism, NAD⁺ metabolism, and central metabolism using LC-MS and NMR-based metabolomics.

Presentation

Studying dynamics of cellular metabolism by metabolomics

Abstract

Cellular metabolism is dynamic and time dependent. Bioactive compounds, such as pharmaceutical drugs, vitamins or phytochemicals, induce cellular metabolic changes. These metabolic alterations inform about the bioactive’s mechanism-of-action or their metabolic fate. The dynamics of metabolite concentrations and pathway turnover are then a proxy of cellular metabolic status.

In our lab, we use a combination of mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) metabolomics approaches to study metabolism, including central, redox, and xenobiotic metabolism in human mammalian cells. On one hand, NMR gathers several advantages in studying cellular metabolism: it allows screening many cellular metabolites in parallel, in a quantitative fashion, and it even allows monitoring kinetic changes over time. And on the other hand, MS allow us to focus on selected panel of metabolites and study them at high sensitivity.

These strategies – snapshot metabolomics and stable isotope ratio metabolomics - are then applied to study cellular biochemistry, such as stem cell diRerentiation, oxidative stress and drug metabolic fate, at the mechanistic level. These biochemical readouts, integrated with other functional readouts, contribute to understanding and developing pharmaceutical and therapeutic programs.