Arundhuti Sen

The past decade has seen a surge in demand for robust, sensitive and reproducible LC-MS methods for use in high-throughput clinical and research environments. Fields such as metabolomics and proteomics routinely make use of these methods for large-scale (population-level) analysis of complex bio-fluids, and the resultant data have the potential to answer long-standing questions about human physiology and disease progression. However, the wide-spread adoption of LC-MS has also resulted in a concomitant increase in the use of organic solvents (methanol, acetonitrile) and in the costs associated with the purchase and disposal of the same. The acetonitrile shortage of 2008 clearly illustrated the need for alternative analytical techniques that complement LC, but which are less dependent on the availability of organic solvents. One such technique is supercritical fluid chromatography or SFC, which uses supercritical fluids (such as supercritical CO₂) instead of organic solvents and is thus an environmentally benign alternative to solvent-hungry LC. While SFC was first developed in the 1960s, recent technological advances have lead to a resurgence in interest in this technique, with its evident advantages for high-throughput applications. Our research within the Microseparations group at KCL focuses on the development of SFC methods for metabolomics, with a particular emphasis on widening the range of the technique to include analysis of polar metabolites; in collaboration with the National Phenome Centre at Imperial College London and their commercial partners, we are using the new generation of SFC instrumentation to resolve outstanding problems in separation science.

Dr. Sen completed her doctoral research at the University of Iowa, with Professor Amnon Kohen, before joining King's College London as a post-doctoral research fellow in 2012. Her Ph.D. research primarily focused on the development of analytical tools for the biophysical characterisation of enzymes involved in folate metabolism. As a research fellow at KCL with Dr. Cristina Legido-Quigley, her interests expanded to include UPLC-MS-based analyses for metabolomics applications, and in her current role as an research associate with Dr. Norman Smith at KCL and the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Center at Imperial College, she is involved in establishing SFC-MS as an analytical platform for high-throughput metabolic profiling studies.