School of Computer Science, University of Manchester

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
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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.

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
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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
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Generating standardised templates for sharing.

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
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