Early career environmental scientists will spend four days learning how to analyse genomes, proteins, and metabolites together, rather than in isolation. This matters because environmental researchers increasingly want to use these "multi-omics" techniques—which can reveal how organisms respond to pollution, pathogens, or climate shifts—but many lack the practical skills to design experiments or integrate the complex datasets. The gap between interest and competence is holding back progress on problems such as biodiversity loss, emerging diseases, and sustainable marine resource management. If the training succeeds, a cohort of early-career researchers will leave able to design robust multi-omics studies, apply appropriate statistical methods, and use open-access analysis tools. That means future environmental research projects will be more likely to generate testable hypotheses and actionable solutions, rather than stalled by technical uncertainty. The course uses lectures, lab sessions, and hands-on data analysis; feedback from a previous workshop was uniformly positive, with 100% of respondents saying they would recommend it to colleagues.
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The four-day training workshop – Applying multi-omics in environmental research – will introduce early career researchers (ECRs) within the environmental sciences to apply multi-omics approaches in their research. The omics technologies covered in this workshop allows the comprehensive characterisation and quantification of the genome, proteome and metabolome in living organisms and by combining this large-scale data allows us to understand the complex role and relationships of these biological molecules. The omics approaches are widely valued across the biological sciences and the application of omics in the environmental sciences continues to rapidly grow, however there is a disparity between the desire and appropriate knowledge and skills of ECRs to both perform the omics and integrate data from multiple omics studies. This course will introduce ECRs to the application of the omics in their research by providing both fundamental background information and hands-on practical experience, developing valuable skills that can be applied in current projects and beyond in future careers. Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to apply the omics and integrate data will prepare ECRs to advance understanding and develop solutions to environmental problems including biodiversity loss, emerging pathogens and pollution, and marine resources. A problem-based learning approach will be applied throughout the workshop to introduce attendees to each omics (genomics, proteomics and metabolomics) and computational tools and strategies to integrate different omics data together. Attendees will learn about the benefits of applying one or multiple omics to answer scientific questions within the NERC scientific remit. By the end of the course attendees will achieve the following learning objectives: (1) Develop an understanding of how the ‘omics can be applied in environmental research; (2) Design robust experimental strategies applying one or multiple omics approaches; (3) Evaluate the application of analytical methods to measure the omics; (4) Develop an understanding of the (multivariate) statistical methods commonly used in one and multi-omics integration analyses, open access tools and software options; (5) Gain confidence to undertake data-driven approaches and exploring multi-omics data to generate testable hypotheses. The course will operate through a mixture of lectures, hands-on practical sessions, laboratory sessions and data analysis and interpretation workshops. Feedback from previous courses is uniformly extremely positive. From the first workshop we ran in March 2023 100% of the respondents would recommend the workshop to colleagues.
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