University of Manchester - Department of Computer Science

The Snoep Lab’s core research efforts are in Computational Systems Biology; a combined experimental, modeling and theoretical approach to quantitatively understand the functional behavior of Biological Systems resulting from the characteristics of their components. Our main focus is on metabolism, of human pathogens such as Plasmodium falciparum, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, but also of breast cancer cell lines, and on modelling disease states such as glucose homeostatis in type 2 diabetes, and ...

The Disease Maps Project is designed as a large-scale community effort. It is a network of groups that work together in order to better understand disease mechanisms. The project exchanges best practices, share information, develop tools to make it easier for all the involved groups to achieve their goals.

Salmon farming in the future must navigate conflicting and shifting demands of sustainability, shifting feed prices, disease, and product quality. The industry needs to develop a flexible, integrated basis of knowledge for rapid response to new challenges. The Digital Salmon will be an ensemble of mathematical descriptions of salmon physiology, combining mathematics, high-dimensional data analysis, computer science and measurement technology with genomics and experimental biology into a concerted ...

FAIRDOM is establishing a support and service network for European Systems Biology. FAIRDOM is a joint action of ERA-Net ERASysAPP and European Research Infrastructure ISBE to establish a data and model management service facility for Systems Biology. Our prime mission is to support researchers, students, trainers, funders and publishers by enabling Systems Biology projects to make their Data, Operating procedures and Models, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).

Projects that do not fall under current programmes.

SysMO is a European transnational funding and research initiative on "Systems Biology of Microorganisms".

The goal pursued by SysMO was to record and describe the dynamic molecular processes going on in unicellular microorganisms in a comprehensive way and to present these processes in the form of computerized mathematical models.

Systems biology will raise biomedical and biotechnological research to a new quality level and contribute markedly to progress in understanding. Pooling European research ...

FAIRDOM will establish a support and service network for European Systems Biology. We will serve projects in standardising, managing and disseminating data and models in a FAIR manner: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

Hypoglycaemia and lactic acidosis are key diagnostics for poor chances of survival in malaria patients. In this project we aim to test to what extent the metabolic activity of Plasmodium falciparum contributes to a changed glucose metabolism in malaria patients. The approach is to start with detailed bottom up models for the parasite and then merge these with more coarse grained models at the whole body level.

Systems Biology studies the properties and phenotypes that emerge from the interaction of biomolecules where such properties are not obvious from those of the individual molecules. By connecting fields such as genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, mathematics, cell biology, genetics, mathematics, engineering and computer sciences, Systems Biology enables discovery of yet unknown principles underlying the functioning of living cells. At the same time, testable and predictive models of complex ...

Collection of training material for SEEK/FAIRDOMHub

Towards the Digital Salmon: From a reactive to a pre-emptive research strategy in aquaculture (DigiSal)

Salmon farming in the future must navigate conflicting and shifting demands of sustainability, shifting feed prices, disease, and product quality. The industry needs to develop a flexible, integrated basis of knowledge for rapid response to new challenges. Project DigiSal will lay the foundations for a Digital Salmon: an ensemble of mathematical descriptions of salmon physiology, combining ...

Here we share resources and best practices to develop a disease map for COVID-19. The project is progressing as a broad community-driven effort. We aim to establish a knowledge repository on virus-host interaction mechanisms specific to the SARS-CoV-2. The COVID-19 Disease Map is an assembly of molecular interaction diagrams established based on literature evidence.

Salmon farmed on modern feeds contains less of the healthy, long-chain fatty acids (EPA and DHA) than before. Up until the turn of the millennium, farmed salmon were fed fish oil as a replacement for their omega-3 rich natural prey. However, fish oil is now a scarce resource, and more than half of the fat in modern feeds comes from plant oils that are inexpensive, but devoid of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. How can we increase the omega-3 content of salmon on sustainable feeds?

One option is ...

The main objectives of SysMO-DB are to: facilitate the web-based exchange of data between research groups within- and inter- consortia, and to provide an integrated platform for the dissemination of the results of the SysMO projects to the scientific community. We aim to devise a progressive and scalable solution to the data management needs of the SysMO initiative, that:

• facilitates and maximises the potential for data exchange between SysMO research groups;
• maximises the ‘shelf life’ and ...