The second edition of the UCIBIO meeting took place at FCT-NOVA, where Post-doc Susana Palma has presented her most recent work entitled "Machine learning for the meta-analyses of microbial pathogens' volatile signatures".

The presented work focused on the application of machine learning methods to identify VOC signatures of clinically relevant human microbial pathogen species. We shared with our colleagues how we compiled and analysed an extensive database on pathogen-VOC associations collected from papers published in the last 40 years. We found that small sets of VOCs are able to distinguish between pathogens, and so these VOCs are potential targets for the development of molecular recognition agents to be integrated in diagnostics devices.