UC Davis
West Coast Metabolomics Center
Letter from the Director
Dear fellow scientists,

We hope you can look back to the year 2021 with satisfaction and success! At the UC Davis West Coast Metabolomics Center, we were happy to have welcomed 10 female speakers to our invited seminar series, showcasing the leadership of women in metabolomics. See below for details and visit our YouTube channel if you have missed the webinars! This year we have also offered a new suite of courses, the 'Bits & Bites' hands-on web-based training units. Due to the tremendous success of these courses we are now extending these units with eight new topics, ranging from in-depth training in the use of the popular MetaboAnalyst tool to GC-MS metabolomics, introduction to the GNPS ecosystem, specialized training for staff scientists in service cores, and much more. See below!

Our Center's research activities were highly successful with several Nature papers, including the "Metabolome Atlas of the Aging Mouse Brain" and the development of better MS/MS matching algorithms by "Spectral Entropy Similarity" that was published today in Nature Methods. Congratulations to all authors for 2021! We are also grateful to receive an NIH S10 shared instrumentation grant that allowed us to install a Bruker timsTOF flex mass spectrometer for improved resolution and for research in MS-based imaging. At the MANA and ASMS2021 conferences, we contributed with a range of oral and poster contributions, highlighting our research in the human upper intestinal tract as well as the use of ultra-high-throughput analyses of clinical cohort samples. These methods are now implemented in our ThermoFisher Center of Excellence in Clinical Metabolomics on the UC Davis Sacramento campus for both research collaborations and metabolomics services.

Our fee-for-service core has weathered the COVID-19 downturn without running into deficits, avoiding cuts to our staff or our assays. Our suite of Agilent, Sciex, and Leco mass spectrometers were used for robust LC- and GC-based metabolomics covering 30,000 samples across 260 projects last year. Beyond data acquisitions, we are happy to offer advanced statistics and bioinformatic evaluations, compound identification, and collaborative research.

Contact us! We look forward to working with you in 2022.

With best wishes for the holidays,
Oliver Fiehn, PhD
Date: Jan. 24 - 28, 2022
Virtual & In-Person Instructor-Led Course (Hybrid)

This course will feature hands-on training with real-world untargeted metabolomics data covering LC-MS data processing, compound identification, statistical analysis, network mapping, & data interpretation, including:
  • Untargeted data processing and exercises on MS-DIAL.
  • Exercises on the identification of unknowns by cheminformatics software workflows
  • Data normalization and transformation with and without internal standards and quality controls
  • Multivariate and univariate statistics 
  • Pathway mapping and enrichment analysis
Bits & Bites is set for 2022, with more added short courses and new in-depth topics! This 10-part short course series will feature in-depth topics in untargeted metabolomics such as Bayesian statistics for metabolomics, fundamental courses in mass spectrometry, introduction to GNPS and MetaboAnalyst, and so many others. Our aim for these courses is that participants can gain a deeper insight into current software and methods. Join us every month for a new & exciting topic!
January 13, 2022:
Fundamental of Mass Spectrometry
Dr. Uri Keshet, UC Davis
February 3, 2022:
Fundamental of Lipidomics
Dr. Tong Shen, UC Davis
March 3, 2022:
Using MS-DIAL to generate accurate comprehensive LC-MS/MS metabolomics datasets
Dr. Jacob Folz, UC Davis
March 31, 2022:
Introduction to the GNPS Ecosystem - Tools, Visualizations, and Data
Dr. Mingxun Wang, UC San Diego & Ometa Labs
April 7, 2022:
Fundamentals of Metabolism
Dr. Oliver Fiehn, UC Davis
May 5, 2022:
Introduction to Bayesian statistics in metabolomics
Dr. Christopher Robert, UC Davis
September 8, 2022:
Identification of unknown compounds in untargeted metabolomics using freely available software Session 1
Dr. Arpana Vaniya, UC Davis
September 9, 2022:
Identification of unknown compounds in untargeted metabolomics using freely available software Session 2
Dr. Arpana Vaniya, UC Davis
October 6, 2022:
Introduction to Metaboanalyst
Dr. Jianguo (Jeff) Xia, McGill University
November 3, 2022:
Fundamentals of Gas Chromatography-MS in Metabolomics
Dr. Oliver Fiehn & Dr. Uri Keshet, UC Davis
December 1, 2022:
How to navigate demands in metabolomics core services
Dr. Oliver Fiehn, UC Davis
If you have any questions feel free to contact us!
Email: Jeannette Martins jmartins@ucdavis.edu
This year the WCMC Online Guest Lecture Seminar Series hosted 10 women in metabolomics as speakers who joined from all around the world. We'd like to thank all of our speakers and attendees for joining and making it such a success!
Dr. Jianguo (Jeff) Xia, McGill University, Canada
Jan 12, 2022, from 10 - 11:30 am PST
"From raw spectra to functional insights and multi-omics integration - a deep dive into MetaboAnalyst 5.0"
You can revisit any online lectures from our past speakers on the WCMC YouTube channel.
Fresh off the press