We propose to develop new chemometric and high-throughput analytical methods to assess the effects of environmental and climate changes on target biological systems which are representative of ecosystems. This project will combine powerful chemometric and analytical high-throughput methodologies with toxicological tests to examine the effects of environmental stressors (like chemical pollution) and of climate change (like temperature, water scarcity or food shortage), on genomic and metabonomic profiles of target biological systems. The complex nature of experimental data produced by high-throughput analytical techniques, such as DNA microarrays, hyphenated chromatography-mass spectrometry or multi-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, requires powerful data analysis tools to extract, summarize and interpret the large amount of information that such megavariate data sets may contain. There is a need to improve and automate every step in the analysis of the data generated from genomic and metabonomic studies using new chemometric and multi- and megavariate tools. The main purpose of this project is to develop such tools. As a result of the whole study, a detailed report on the effects of global change and chemical pollution on the genomic and metabonomic profiles of a selected set of representative target biological systems will be delivered and used for global risk assessment. The information acquired, data sets and computer software will be stored in public data bases using modern data compression and data management technologies. And all the methodologies developed in the project will be published.

ERC-2012-ADG