Metabolomics
etabolism has been studied on some level for hundreds or thousands of years. People often associate metabolism with nutrition. In the life sciences, a detailed discussion of metabolism is usually presented in a variety of courses, including introductory biology, cell biology, microbiology and biochemistry. With the advent of the human genome project, there is a shift in perspective in the life sciences to something called "systems biology" in which we view living organisms or groups of organisms as systems with a number of components. The question then becomes, "if I perturb the system by changing concentrations of a component, or I remove a component or I add a new component, how is that going to affect the system?
This site is being developed at the Rochester Institute of Technology for the purpose of introducing a systems biology perspective to the traditional metabolism course that is part of our one year biochemistry course sequence. Here is a proposed time line within our program.
2008 Project Begins. We are simply trying to populate the topics with links to excellent web resources and open access articles. Students will write brief summaries of each resource they identify.
2009 Project Refinements. We will re-evaluate the table of contents and reorganize it to reflect the most important content areas, adding or removing additional table of contents entries as appropriate. Students will actually write individual chapters based on the linked web resources and open access articles.
2010 Working Textbook. The second draft of each chapter will be prepared and input will be solicited from the broader community of life science educators. This refinement process will continue indefinitely until either (a) metabolomics is incorporated into all existing educational materials relating to metabolism or (b) my preferred choice - online textbooks become the norm, freeing students from the cost of purchase and freeing faculty from having 1000 kg of textbooks on their shelves.
Please also view our book on Proteomics.
