Birmingham to host first UK centre to study environmental metabolomics

The University of Birmingham has won funding to run the UK's first NERC-funded centre to use metabolomics technologies to study the environment. The new national Environmental Metabolomics Facility supported by funding from NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) will lead work using the new technology to understand the interactions between an organism and its natural environment. Metabolomics can be used to study the effects of pollutant chemicals on organism health and is also a powerful tool for characterising the effects of disease on populations. Metabolomics is part of a new family of technologies called the omics, which study aspects of an organism's chemistry in great detail. Proteomics looks at thousands of individual proteins, genomics at an organism's genome while metabolomics looks at the chemical signatures that reactions in cells leave behind. These technologies allow scientists to create a metabolic fingerprint for an individual animal or plant. The new centre will give UK environmental scientists access to Birmingham's world class facilities for NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and advanced computation to analyse highly detailed metabolic data.