16.04.2018

Not only in summer, various summer schools and summer academies offer the opportunity to deepen your knowledge and acquire expert skills. At the beginning of March, the de.NBI Winter School trained young researchers working in the field of metabolomics - that is, research into the collection of enzymatic reaction products of an organism - in data processing and evaluation. Dr. Steffen Neumann of the IPB co-organized the event and also served as a lecturer there.

The de.NBI Winter School on Computational Metabolomics was organized by the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry Halle, the University of Tübingen and the University of Jena as part of the German Network of Bioinformatics Infrastructures (de.NBI) from March 5-8, 2018 at the honorable Leucorea in Lutherstadt Wittenberg. Welcoming 30 participants from seven European countries, courses were taught by trainers from France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The Winter School covered topics ranging from experimental design considerations to data sharing. It started with lectures and hands-on sessions on the processing, normalization, and quality control of LC-MS data followed by sessions on statistics, the PhenoMeNal infrastructure, and the identification of unknown metabolites. On the last day, the lecturers introduced NMR spectroscopy and WikiPathways. In addition to the interactive and instructive sessions, the Winter School offered numerous opportunities during meals and breaks to have one-on-one discussions with the lecturers. All in all, the young researchers were equipped to raise the treasure of data that the steadily improving metabolomics analysis methods holds.