Workshop on Metabolomics for Plant, Human, and Animal Health (2016)

The Plant Biotechnology Area of TERI organized a two-day workshop on 'Metabolomics for Plant, Human, and Animal Health' on November 17 and 18, 2016. The key objective of the workshop was to sensitize the scientific community on the emerging areas of metabolomics, and to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to metabolomics study for plants, humans, and animal health.

More than 40 national and international delegates from various organizations such as research institutes, universities, and funding agencies attended the workshop. The workshop began with a welcome address by Mr Arvind Kaushal, Distinguished Fellow, TERI followed by a brief introduction about the event by Dr Nutan Kaushik, Senior Fellow, TERI during the inaugural session. Prof Oliver Fiehn, Director, UC Davis Genome Centre, USA delivered the keynote address via Skype. He provided an in-depth overview of application of metabolomics in the health sector. At the end of the session, vote of thanks was proposed by Dr Vibha Dhawan, Distinguish Fellow and Senior Director, TERI.

The programme included invited talks on emerging technologies and application of metabolomics in research fields such as analytical techniques, pre-analytical metabolomics, mass spectroscopy in metabolomics, work flow on MS-based metabolomics, and application of metabolomics in plant, animal and veterinary science and more. The two-day workshop ended with a round table discussion on the topic 'How to Apply Metabolomics to the Needs of Indian Research'.

The workshop provided an interactive forum to the researchers, students, and funding agencies for discussing various bottlenecks and findings of the metabolomics application in the research field for plants, humans, and animal health.