A main thrust of research in the Wood group is the development of miniaturized low-flow electrospray ionization (ESI) techniques coupled to mass spectrometry for the detection of molecules in biological fluids.  Of particular interest is the detection of molecular biomarkers that may be used to diagnose medical conditions or behavioral states. Interdisciplinary projects in this area are available for undergraduate researchers. 

In the first project, an existing hypothesis for the cause of autism is that peptides derived from wheat and dairy products pass through the digestive tract into the central nervous system, where they affect behavior.   Recent evidence in our group suggests that levels of endogenous opioids are suppressed in autistic subjects.  Low-flow ESI mass spectrometry is being used to both identify and also to quantify levels of endogenous and exogenous opioids in urine and blood plasma samples; levels of individual peptides are being compared between healthy control subjects and autistic subjects.  Levels of opioid peptides in cerebrospinal fluid are known to fluctuate as a function of behavior.  During the latter half of summer 2005, our collaborator Professor Giuseppe Fanciulli, an endocrinologist from the School of Medicine at the University of Sassari, Sassari, Italy, will be joining us to further the efforts of this project.

A specialized low-flow ESI emitter has been developed in our lab that enables rapid digestion of proteins with very high peptide mass sequence coverage.  We wish to apply these devices to sequencing of proteins of known function related to disease (e.g. diabetes and cancer) but whose amino sequences have not been solved using tandem mass spectrometry.  This project would involve some collaboration with a local company I founded called Nanogenesys, Inc.

In collaboration with the Research Institute on Addictions and the Dept. of Psychology at UB, we are currently developing methodology to extract cerebrospinal fluid from rats and to monitor levels of different metabolites of neuropeptide Y, a group of peptides believed to play prominent roles in the behavior of drug addiction and other behaviors, by low-flow ESI.