Ms. Buthaina Al-Balushi and Ms. Raya Al-Malki, Technical staff and Dr. Mohamed Essa, Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, SQU recently authored a book that explains the easy to understand ways for biochemical assessments in labs for undergraduate students. The book titled “Biochemistry Laboratory Manual for Undergraduate Students” under Biochemistry Research Trends category is published by Nova Science Publishers, INC, USA (IBSN - 978-1-53614-967-8, https://novapublishers.com/shop/biochemistry-laboratory-manual-for-undergraduate-students/). This book contains 4 main chapters and many sub chapters to discuss about the major biochemical assessments related with macro and micronutrients.

This laboratory manual has been designed for nutrition students for a better understanding of the lab assessments including biochemistry and food chemistry lab assessments. This manual includes both qualitative and quantitative analyses of some of the macro and micronutrients. The aim of this manual is to help students understand the principles underlying every assessment so they can undertake analysis even in the absence of an instructor. “As the authors, we hope this initiative would be useful to students studying nutrition, food science and life sciences as well. We also believe this manual will be sensitive to students who do not speak English as their first language, as the idea for this manual itself came out of our experiences with students who aren’t native speakers”, the three authors said.

The advantage of this book is indexed in Scopus for worldwide circulation and it is free to download. Further, this book reinforces the importance of capacity building and mentoring the technical staff for writing books and articles. The book was published on 24th March 2019.