Elizabeth Cannell

Research

Inborn errors of metabolism are often fatal or severely debilitating. Fruit-flies, Drosophila melanogaster, share 70% of their genes with humans, providing an excellent and inexpensive in vivo system for the study of metabolism. A tissue-specific model of Drosophila metabolism is currently being developed that will elucidate the tissue interactions supporting these critical processes and increase understanding of the systems biology of multicellular organisms. Underlying this tissue-specific model is the metabolic map in Drosophila, which details the synthesis and degradation of metabolites. Although the majority of this map is predicted by KEGG (http://www.genome.jp/kegg), “gaps” still remain where Drosophila orthologues have not been identified for metabolic enzymes. One of the key goals of the project is to fill several of these gaps using computational approaches, reverse genetics and metabolomic analysis. The other main goals are to refine the tissue-specific model by investigating the tissue specificity of genes encoding metabolic enzymes, and to test the hypothesis that different tissues have unique metabolomes. The ultimate goal of the work is to contribute to the development of a model that, once complete, can be used for modelling inborn errors of metabolism, probing the effects of various mutations, and screening for potential treatment approaches.