Metabolomics: Understanding Metabolism in the 21st Century (FutureLearn)

Metabolomics: Understanding Metabolism in the 21st Century (FutureLearn)

Discover how metabolomics is revolutionising our understanding of metabolism with this free online course. Metabolomics is an emerging field that aims to measure the complement of metabolites (the metabolome) in living organisms. The metabolome represents the downstream effect of an organism’s genome and its interaction with the environment. Metabolomics has a wide application area across the medical and biological sciences.

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The course provides an introduction to metabolomics, describes the tools and techniques we use to study the metabolome and explains why we want to study it. By the end of the course you will understand how metabolomics can revolutionise our understanding of metabolism.

Syllabus

Week 1: An Introduction to metabolomics
Week 2: A multi-disciplinary approach to study the metabolome
Week 3: Measuring the metabolome
Week 4: Data analysis and metabolite identification

What will you achieve?

  • Demonstrate an understanding of the biological relevance of metabolites (the small molecular weight intermediates and products of metabolism) and the metabolome
  • Assess the challenges involved in studying the metabolome
  • Develop an awareness of the analytical techniques and data analysis tools that are applied to study the metabolome
  • Evaluate how the interaction of scientists from different disciplines has driven the development of this field

Who is the course for?
The course is primarily aimed at final year undergraduate science students and research scientists who are interested in learning about the application of metabolomics to understand metabolism. However, metabolomics is a new tool to the scientific community and this course will provide a valuable introduction to scientists at any stage in their careers. It is not essential to have any previous knowledge of the subject area but a reasonable knowledge and understanding of science would be beneficial.

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