Save the date 20-22 April 2018
BioVisionAlexandria 2018
New Life Sciences: Towards SDGs
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Speaker Details

 
 

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   Biography
 
Mohamed A. Farag, Ph.D. Alexander von Humboldt fellow Professor, Chemistry Department American University in Cairo, Egypt Specializing in metabolomics, natural products chemistry, and plant biochemistry, Mohamed A. Farag completed his PhD at Texas Tech University, USA, in 2003. In 2005, after spending time as a postdoctoral fellow at The Samuel Noble Foundation, USA, and the James Graham Brown Cancer Center, USA, he became assistant professor in 2005 at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University, Egypt. Since 2009, Dr Farag has been working as a part time visiting professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, to participate in teaching plant metabolomics and chemomterics modelling for master students, and in 2009–2010 he held the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry, Germany. Dr Farag now works full time as a professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) where his research work focuses primarily around applying innovative biochemical technologies (metabolomics) to help answer complex biological questions in medicine, herbal drugs analysis and agriculture. Dr. Farag has been recognized with several awards, including Abd el Hameed Shoman award (2016), Egypt Higher State Incentive Award (2012), Cairo University Incentive Award (2009), TWAS award in science diplomacy (2014), and the Mass Spectroscopy Performance Award, TTU, USA (2004). For his highly cited publications of 100 scientific papers with close to 4000 citations and an H index of 26, Dr. Farag was selected as a top researcher in the field of plant biology in Africa by the American society of plant biology, USA. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohamed_Farag6
 
 
  Abstract
 
Metabolomics getway for milestone discoveries in the post genomic era
The ability to sequence whole plant and human genomes has taught us that our knowledge with respect to gene function is rather limited. Functional genomics analyses include investigations at the level of gene expression (transcriptomics), protein translation (proteomics) and more recently the metabolite network (metabolomics). Metabolomics is the study of global metabolite profiles in a system (cell, tissue, or organism) under a given set of conditions. The analysis of the metabolome is particularly challenging due to the diverse chemical nature of metabolites in a cell. This presentation provides an overview of metabolomics and discusses its complementary role within system biology. It highlights how metabolome analyses are being conducted using different spectroscopic techniques NMR and MS, and how the highly complex data generated are analyzed. Specific examples will then be presented to illustrate how metabolomics can lead to valuable information relative to natural products drug discovery, herbal medicines quality control analysis and disease prognosis i.e. biomarkers discovery.