UC Davis has a long and broad history of metabolomic research and service and is a leading institution in making next-generation genomics available for biomedical and translational research.
The West Coast Metabolomics Center has been funded in September 2012 as NIH Regional Resource Core [link] to make this expertise available as service to a greater number of investigators in more diverse fields while simultaneously advancing the state-of-the art in metabolomics research.
The West Coast Metabolomics Center offers fee-based services to biomedical, preclinical and clinical researchers through its Central Service Core laboratories, which are the Metabolomics Service Core, the Bioinformatics Core, the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) service facility, and the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging (CMGI). These service laboratories all have been in operation for more than six years and have an established research clientele. They will expand their outreach to new investigators and provide services on a recharge basis in an integrated manner.
The Center will advance the state of metabolomics research through its Advanced Services laboratories, which offer metabolomic collaborations on a project-basis in specific areas of metabolism, namely glycomics, lipid mediators, eicosanoids, steroids, complex lipids and primary metabolism, in addition to image-guided metabolomics. These laboratories will offer advanced services for Pilot and Feasibility projects and will transfer their most robust methods and procedures to the Core Services to advance the overall depth and breadth of services rendered the West Coast Metabolomics Center.
The Center will open opportunities for new research through its Outreach Core to international and regional investigators. We will provide educational courses and workshops to inform biologists and clinicians on the wealth and power of metabolomics for translational science, train the next generation of scientists through our Clinical and Translational Science Center courses and provide direct access to integrative metabolomic sciences through our yearly Pilot and Feasibility projects program.
Finally, the Center will advance the level of metabolic interpretations in the Genomics Integration core through integration with pathway information, genetic data and network statistics. The interpretation of metabolomic data is not straightforward. The Center will integrate genomic data for metabolic interpretations by curating human pathways in HumanCyc, advancing use of sequencing data for metabolic understanding through metagenomic and sequencing services, and by extending statistical analysis of overenrichment pathways, including visualization tools.