ÿþ<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <HTML> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"> <title>PhD project:</title> <meta name="Generator" content="Cocoa HTML Writer"> <meta name="CocoaVersion" content="824.48"> <style type="text/css"> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: right; font: 16.0px Arial; color: #0000C0} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Arial; color: #264211} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: right; font: 12.0px Arial; color: #264211} p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Arial; color: #000000} p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Arial} table.t1 {width: 800.0px} td.td1 {width: 200.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px} td.td2 {width: 771.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px} td.td3 {width: 650.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px} td.td4 {width: 18.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px} td.td5 {width: 792.0px; padding: 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px 4.0px} </style> </head> <body> <table width="600.0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="t1"> <tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" class="td1"> <p class="p1">EASTBIO PhD project:</p> </td> <td colspan="2" valign="top" class="td2"> <p class="p2"><b>Applying Systems Biology to Address Diseases of Metabolism</b></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" class="td1"> <p class="p1">supervisors:</p> </td> <td colspan="2" valign="top" class="td2"> <p class="p2">Dr John Mitchell (Chemistry), Dr Anne Smith (Biology), University of St Andrews</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" class="td1"> <p class="p1">funding details:</p> </td> <td colspan="2" valign="top" class="td2"> <p class="p2">Competition Funded Project - UK/EU Students only. The student will require a minimum of an upper second class honours degree and the studentship is open to UK and European Community students. Fees and stipend are covered for UK students. EU students can get fees-only covered if they have not studied in the UK and can get full stipend and fees if they have studied in the UK for 3 or more years. </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" class="td1"> <p class="p1">closing date:</p> </td> <td valign="top" class="td3"> <p class="p2">31 Jan 2012</p> </td> <td valign="top" class="td4"> <p class="p1"> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="middle" class="td1"> <p class="p1">Contact:</p> </td> <td valign="middle" class="td3"> <p class="p2"><a href="mailto:jbom@st-andrews.ac.uk">jbom@st-andrews.ac.uk</a> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><font color=#0000C0>01334 467259</font></p> </td> <td valign="middle" class="td4"> <p class="p3"></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="3" valign="middle" class="td5"> <p class="p4">Our aim is to use measures of network structure and robustness to assess the vulnerability of different species to metabolic diseases. As well as better understanding human and animal disease, this will also give us insight into interventions which will disrupt a pathogen's metabolism without harming the host. Our increasing understanding of the complex interactions between proteins and small organic molecules allows us to decipher metabolic networks where enzyme-catalysed reactions link together substrates and products to form pathways and cycles. A wealth of bioinformatics data allows us to trace both the variation of networks across different species and also the networks evolution. We already have software that simulates metabolism's evolution. Since we know contemporary biochemistry better than its ancient roots, our simulations work backwards in time, suggesting plausible evolutionary trajectories. This work will allow us to predict the perturbations that would disrupt metabolic networks, and those which could be safely applied. We will be able to categorise the architecture and robustness or fragility of systems across both biological species and time. Potential future applications include the use of synthetic biology to exquisitely design interventions that will affect the pathogen's metabolism without risk to the host or environment. </p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p class="p5"></p> </body> </html>