Elizabeth is a Wellcome Trust 4 year PhD student in the Molecular Functions in Disease program. At present, she is completing her second research placement in the Dow/Davies lab. Prior to studying at the University of Glasgow, Elizabeth completed a BSc in Honours Psychology, specializing in Behavioral Neuroscience, and a minor in Interdisciplinary Science studies at Concordia University in her hometown of Montreal, Canada. While at Concordia, her undergraduate work exploring the role of estrogen in the prefrontal cortex of rats earned her a prize for outstanding undergraduate thesis. Other recent research work includes a placement in the lab of Professor Darren Monckton, developing an assay for identifying variant repeats in the CTG repeat tracts of myotonic dystrophy patients.
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.