Study Group report
This is the final report on the problem of lipid metabolism and comparative genomics, brought to ESGI53 by Unilever.

Report authors
Marcus Tindall (University of Oxford)
Jonathan Rougier (University of Durham)
Laura Pickersgill (Unilever Corporate Research)
John Melrose (Unilever Corporate Research)
Brendan O'Malley (Unilever Corporate Research)
Janette Jones (Unilever Corporate Research)

Introduction
The Study Group participants were asked to focus on two questions relating to metabolism. The first of these concerned modelling lipoprotein metabolism such that differences in the biology of the healthy and obese states can be encompassed as well as changes in the size and composition of lipoprotein particles. The use of ordinary differential equation models to infer rate constants from experimental data was discussed and a partial differential equation model was developed to describe the dynamics of lipoprotein particle formation.

The second problem focused on understanding how certain components of well understood biological networks can help in determining the functionality of other networks, in which certain components are not so well determined. The study group participants focused on issues regarding comparative genomics to discuss this question. A number of issues were addressed including the derivation of parameter values from experimental data via a stoichiometric matrix and the importance of randomly sampling and comparing sections of known networks.

Download 'Unilever-report.pdf' (211 Kb).