Unilever asked the Study Group to focus on two problems. The first concerned dysregulated lipid metabolism which is a feature of many diseases including metabolic syndrome, obesity and coronary heart disease. The Study Group was asked to develop a model of the kinetics of lipoprotein metabolism between healthy and obese states incorporating the activities of key enzymes.

The second concerned the use of comparative genomics in understanding and comparing metabolic networks in bacterium. Comparative genomics is a method to make inferences on the genome of a new organism using information of a previously charaterised organism. The first mathematical question is how one would quantify such a metabolic map in a statistical sense, in particular, where there are different levels of confidence for presense of different parts of the map. The next and most important question is how one can design a measurement strategy to maximise the confidence in the accuracy of the metabolic map.

Problem presented by
Janette Jones, Brendan O'Malley, Patrick Warren, Laura Pickersgill and John Melrose, Unilever

Study Group contributors
David Broomhead (University of Manchester)
Jens Gravesen (Technical University of Denmark)
Poul Hjorth (Technical University of Denmark)
James Ing (University of Aberdeen)
John King (University of Nottingham)
Bill Lionheart (University of Manchester)
Eirik Mo (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
James Parrott (University of Bristol)
Jonathan Rougier (University of Durham)
Marcus Tindall (University of Oxford)
Eddie Wilson (University of Bristol)