With a rustle, 300 pages flip in unison and then fall quiet. Pens scratch to the sound of the voice at the front of the lecture hall.

Oliver Fiehn, associate professor of molecular and cellular biology and member of the UC Davis Genome Center, flashes his laser pointer on the screen showing how the molecular structure of Vitamin D changes through metabolism.

The challenge, he said, is bringing each lecture to life for his students. Every time he stands before this crowd, he tries to answer one question: "How does this lecture relate to current research?"

Students today are infused with an understanding of biology as a linear hierarchy from genes to proteins to metabolites, according to Fiehn. His goal is to break through that rigid model to help students see, for example, that hormones are triggers that act upon genes and that genetic expression is a product of a number of biological and environmental variables.

Fiehn describes himself as a mixture of a biologist, chemist and computational scientist. A specialist in plant metabolism, over the past two years he has migrated to diabetes research and is now producing a paper on bioinformatics. To Fiehn, his path is not incongruous. In order to understand complex organisms, he said, we need to understand simple organisms. And to do that, we need to understand analytical and computational techniques and methods.

In other words, Fiehn breaks open the box to see all the working parts and then puts them back together again, bolstered with a confidence that comes from understanding hidden dimensions.

"Most of my time," Fiehn said, "is spent in front of a computer screen, because that's where the discovery occurs."

The computational aspects of metabolic research are not standard textbook material in Fiehn's Bioenergetics and Metabolism (BIS 103) course, however. So he has added a special unit on analytical chemistry, covering instrumentation and data resolution, among other topics.

Before joining the faculty of UC Davis in the fall of 2004, Fiehn was group leader of metabolic analysis in the department of plant molecular physiology at the Max-Planck Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

His lab is now in the Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility where he grows Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, unicellular green algae atypical in metabolic studies.

Consistent with his approach of deciphering the most basic in order to understand the complex, Fiehn uses the simple organism to unravel complex questions about metabolism.

Through a variety of mass spectrometric techniques, he expects to be able to extrapolate technical and methodological insights from these experiments that will inform his next big project: studying environmental impacts on rat lung development.

While Fiehn is analyzing data and developing new techniques and methods to better understand metabolism, his students can expect to be drawn beyond the textbook to learn about new discoveries — right from the lab.

Jan Kingsbury is the director of communications and marketing for the College of Biological Sciences.